The story of Frank Money, a black Korean War vet on his way back to Georgia, “Home” refracts the early 1950s through an individual filter, although the most striking thing about the novel may be how little it succeeds in drawing us in.
Morrison’s 10th novel, “Home,” highlights this issue it is a thin book with some beautiful writing that ultimately comes off as insubstantial and contrived. Still, more often than not, her stature (the most recent American Nobel literature laureate, she was named last week as one of 13 recipients of this year’s Presidential Medal of Freedom) prevents us from seeing her as a writer, which is to say as fallible, prone as all writers are to the excitations and limitations of, in Faulkner’s famous phrase, her “own little postage stamp of native soil.” I say this not to minimize her achievements - three masterpieces in a lifetime are three more than most authors produce. Anyone who’s read her in any depth may understand what I’m referring to: those stentorian rhythms, the biblical cadences, the characters who function more as archetypes than flesh-and-blood.
Of her nine novels, three - “Song of Solomon” (1977), “Beloved” (1987) and 2008’s “A Mercy” - are masterpieces, yet the others, particularly the post-Nobel books “Paradise” (1997) and “Love” (2003) can be so stylized as to veer dangerously close to self-parody. I’ve long admired Toni Morrison as a moral visionary, but her fiction, not so much.
0 kommentar(er)
