Review: Home by Toni Morrison

Having reached her ninth decade, more than four of which have been spent as a novelist, it is perhaps unsurprising that Toni Morrison has been subject to accusations that she is running out of steam.  However there is still much to be enjoyed in this brief novel, which tells the story of Korean War veteran Frank, who has returned to America and now traverses the country to rescue his sister Cee from an unspecified threat.

Perhaps the most eloquent praise of Morrison’s style came from an unlikely source – a review in Cosmo described Jazz (1992) as 'Shakespeare singing the blues’.  At her best she is as talented a wordsmith as anyone alive, demonstrated perhaps most clearly in her Nobel lecture where she reflected on language itself: ‘Language can never "pin down" slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable’.