On Memorial Day we are encouraged to remember those who have given
their lives for the country through their military service. Toni
Morrison's new novel
Home follows one soldier's homecoming. It is a sobering mediation on the limits of our ability to understand. My take
appears today on the Oxford University Press blog. I can't fully cross-post, but here's the beginning:
Toni Morrison’s new novel Home
about a Korean War veteran’s struggles after the war might seem
perfectly suited to an impending cultural turn. The close of the U.S.
combat mission in Iraq and an anticipated draw-down of American troops
in Afghanistan, might signal the end of a war era and a renewed focus on
what we now call the homeland. Perhaps we can turn to Morrison’s
beautiful and brief narrative to understand the journeys of our
generation’s soldiers as they, like Frank Money (the protagonist), try
to find their way home.
The message of this novel is sobering. Whatever home might be for
Frank, it is not a place where war is absent, as he brings Korea along
with him as he travels. If peace is thought of as an absence of war, it
is a state that Morrison’s character is unable to experience. War
memories, psychological injury, and loss have become a part of him, so
that his wartime and peacetime selves have become one. His army jacket
and dog tags
are outward signs of an inner melding. Home for this soldier/citizen
cannot be a place apart. And so a central theme in the novel is the kind
of space home can be for a broken veteran like Frank.
Continue reading
here. Cross-posted from
War Time.
