Author Toni Morrison: The first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature and the only living American Nobel laureate in literature.

The word “home” can stir up many varied emotions, a knotted macramé of emotions. The simple joy of perhaps simpler times.  Old tensions.  Old pain.  For most, just hearing the word “home” draws out, needle-like, different places at different times with threads of pain and joy thickening or thinning from one tapestry to the next.

For me, the word “home” stirs up the red dust of Alabama behind my father’s speeding car.  A muddy-river baptism by the hand of sweaty, now faceless, deacons.  Pecan trees.  And pines and oaks as thick and green as broccoli as far as the eye can see.  That home is where my childhood lives.  It’s where my grandmother still picks blackberries and bakes blackberry pies for her favorite granddaughter who is not me.  It’s where my grandfather still drives a lemon yellow F-O-R-D truck, wears blue-jean-overalls with a matching conductor’s cap, and hums a song the words of which only he (and God) knows.  All with a toothpick seesawing against his lip.

But sometimes, it is difficult to let my mind go back there, down those long lonely roads to visit the remaining uncles and aunts, aging and sun-darkened like prunes and raisins.  As an adult, that home now represents loss.  Misplaced like socks, neither my mother, my father, nor any of my grandparents can be found there anymore.  You see, they’ve gone on to other homes—where the streets are supposedly paved in gold.  The home you and I dread when we’re content with how life is treating us.  The same home that the soul—oh, so secretly—pants for during the dry seasons.

Tony Morrison’s Home is my first experience with the author.  I don’t have the luxury of comparing Home, the story of a Korean War vet on a quest to save his younger sister, to the Bluest Eye or Beloved.  The prize-winning author is not my first love.  Maya Angelou is.  And I’ve been afraid to have the voices of two loves bickering and competing with each other in my mind.  I’m loyal that way.

As I am also passionate about writing and certain authors, know that for me then, this discussion feels like a confession of cheating.  (Don’t tell Maya.)

Frank Money, the main character of Home, has been burdened with some unhappy news that draws him back home.  Kicking, screaming, hallucinating.  To a home he hates.  Along the mean, racist way home, issues—familial, personal, deeply private—are revealed as steadily as my grandmother peeling back the black eyes, skin, dirt, and bruised places from ice potatoes.

Getting to the meat of the matter, as you might expect, is a beautifully frank literary experience:

Cee stood up in the zinc tub and took a few dripping steps to the sink. She filled a bucket from the faucet, poured it into the warming tub water, and sat back down in it. She wanted to linger in cool water while a softly suffering afternoon light encouraged her thoughts to tumble. Regrets, excuses, righteousness, false memory, and future plans mixed together or stood like soldiers in line. . . .

And can’t you just see—and feel—the ecstasy in these leaves?

Wishful thinking, perhaps, but he [Frank] could have sworn the sweet bay was pleased to agree. Its olive-green leaves went wild in the glow of a fat cherry-red sun. . . .

Other passages taken together can be overwhelming for those of us whose heads would rather float in the white clouds than be dragged down to the harshness of Morrison’s sometimes vulgar outhouse realism.  Beyond the beauty of Home, out back is that other stuff—the too gritty (Stephen King-ish) realism of excerpts from other works that turned me off from reading the whole:

Egg yolks, not sliding now but stuck like phlegm to the window; not just sanitary napkins, but the whole box of Kotex—douche bags, enema attachments, Massengill; one shot-up boy’s lame arm pointing to another adding depth; not one, but two great big-headed girls; an instance of “cutting the ‘girl’ in two”; vomiting girls and sun-smacked girls; and juice-sucking aphids and all of the worms that could wriggle from a fisherman’s can.

And my favorite horror, for its oh-so-troubling surgical precision:

So, as was often the case when he was alone and sober, whatever the surroundings, he saw a boy pushing his entrails back in, holding them in his palms like a fortune-teller’s globe shattering with bad news; or he heard a boy with only the bottom half of his face intact, the lips calling mama. And he was stepping over them, around them, to stay alive, to keep his own face from dissolving, his own colorful guts under that oh-so-thin sheet of flesh.

At only a handful of pages, poetic passages don’t sprawl from the mountaintop down the hill to the valleys.  As with any decent horror story, images are brought in tight and close, as if under a magnifying glass; similarly, in Morrison’s Home, a lot of good stuff gets stuffed into a small space:  Frank’s frankness when he demands that the storyteller get his story right; the humor in “dampening” one’s appetite as opposed to “whetting” it; the way the supernatural encroaches unexpectedly and is dispelled just as unexpectedly—as if softening the hard realism with just a touch of a sheer blanket so subtle as to be subliminal.

But unfortunately, horror upon horror in such a small space numbs the senses and sympathy for the victims is lost.

Perhaps this is why Beloved, long-time lovers of Toni Morrison, Lord A Mercy, seem to hold no Love for Home’s brevity.  Abrupt, unregulated memories of masterpieces past have put a watery shine in their eyes—if I may borrow the author’s words.  They’re whining and complaining about the lack of foreplay, the wining, the dining; the less than epic Songs of Solomon; the loss of long walks of older works; and, most of all, all that Jazz they’ve become accustomed to.  For loyal Morrison fans, I feel that Cee, Frank’s sister, says it best: ‘Sometimes better turns out to be simply more.’  And while Morrison, a National Book Award, Pulitzer, and Nobel Prize winner, could have certainly turned The Bluest Eye envy-green by increasing the quantity of her mean, poetic prose, I say, sometimes a quickie during a short stay at Home—though not rising to the heights of Paradise—can still be as satisfying.  If not more.

So, does Home, in its few but meaty pages, answer the question, can you ever really go back home?  Sure.  As long as you expect everything and nothing at all to be the same.