Home by Toni Morrison

This very short book is a wonderful and powerful book, all the more amazing because it delivers its punch in a 150 pages or less.  The message is not a pleasant one, but you do not have to wade through a massive tome to get it.  It is quick and ugly and instructive.  The story is set post-Korean War, and Frank Money is a young black poor veteran who has PTSD.  He is unpredictably violent, frinking heavily and unemployed.  He is also being involuntarily hospitalized in a psychiatric facility and the novel opens with him cleverly escaping said facility.

Frank is seeking redemption, and he has a very specific goal and destination in mind.  The uplifting part of the novel revolves around the African-American community that he finds along the way.  The only silver lining in being marginalized is that you can stick together and help people who are similarly marginalized make their way in life.  Frank knows that he is damaged, even though he is not sure what to do about it and why it happened to him, but he does know what he has to do, and no one who helps him along his way ever asks him why he is doing what he is doing.  The culture that surrounds him is loving, and that is the heart warming part of the story.

The not so heart warming part is that Frank fought for his country, was forever changed by the violence that he himself perpetrated in the name of war, and then he returns to a country that doesn't value him any more now than when he left--one police officer stops his being beaten when he notices that Frank is a veteran, but otherwise the experience of war is all about loses.

I cannot help but think about the men and women currently in uniform in the United States--many of whom have been in combat longer than any American soldier since the Revolutionary War.  I hope for a better fate for them than Frank found waiting for him.