Home: A Novel

"Morrison is very good at taking a period we think we know—the 50s and the Korean War , for example—and creating an opportunity for us to imagine it differently to reveal truths we had missed altogether. She was aware that the 50s had been romanticized, so she was eager to illustrate how what may have been “happy days” for some people were not happy days for others. In Home , she centers the story around a Korean vet, Frank Money, who returns home and must simultaneously face the haunting atrocities of war and discover that the horrors of racism in America remain as they were before he left. Indeed, one of the people he meets says, “‘don’t let that uniform and all that fool you, you know you’re still here in the South.” When he first returns to America, he gets in trouble and ends up in a psych ward, the site where he is at the beginning of the novel. He then escapes the psych ward, and begins his own Odysseus-like journey from the North back to the South—the place he said he’d never planned to go—only because of a note he receives from a woman who works for the doctor where his sister was employed. Home starts in media res , like Song of Solomon , because Morrison wants the reader to feel disoriented, just as Black people were disoriented when snatched from their homeland and put on slave ships as cargo. For Morrison, the space and time may differ, but the realities of racial oppression and the cultural strategies Black people used to survive, thrive, and flourish despite those realities were the substance of her imagination. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The chapters in Home alternate between first-person italicized chapters where Frank Money describes his own understanding of his narrative and third-person (allegedly) objective renderings of his narrative. By jostling between the narrative and Money’s challenges to the narrative, Morrison challenges the reader to question the nature of their own presuppositions about the racial history of the South. She also challenges the different meanings of “home,” especially when the country Frank considers home is not where he experiences a sense of home. Moreover, at the crux of his return is discovering that his sister has fallen prey to the nefarious practices of a doctor engaged in medical experimentation on Black women’s reproductive organs. Home illustrates how the health sciences have a history of abuses against Black bodies in the name of health and eugenics . America did not have a history of being a space that was “snug and wide open”—to use Morrison’s description of home from her essay by the same title—but the novel illustrates the ways in which Black people made it home despite the forces that mitigated against them. Race operates as a social construct and as a system of oppression that deny one’s humanity in almost every arena of life. In each of her books, Morrison was concerned with how racism shows up to devalue and discredit ways of knowing, ways of being, and ways of understanding oneself and one’s community. In one novel after another, she presents and represents nuanced examples of the cost of racism to this nation. Yet, she was equally adept at showing the ways in which Black people subverted the forms and effects of racism and how they affirmed their humanity despite the pernicious systems of racism that attempted to minimize and marginalize them. Her work contains powerful examples of how language, narrative and culture sustained her characters and gave them a way to affirm their dignity, even when they were flawed. She was equally interested in how racism deprived white people of their humanity as well. Morrison is really interested in how racialized thinking has operated and how it has affected all of us—sometimes in ways we’re not aware—and I think her writing is designed to create spaces where we get to see how these things happen. In her nonfiction, she puts her prose to work in another, even more incisive way than she does in her art."