Cruel intentions

Home

The latest from Nobel laureate novelist Toni Morrison is technically a novel, but in reality, Home(Alfred A. Knopf, $24) is a narrative prose-poem that explores the ways in which cruelty propagates and defends itself. Frank Money is a penniless, traumatized Korean War vet who wakes up in a northern United States mental hospital, escapes and begins a journey back to his native Georgia to rescue his sister, Cee. This is a poetic dose of cold water for those who would surrender for mid-century nostalgia are truly mad—the gynecologist who is using Cee in a brutal medical experiment, for example—while the women do not blithely accept their lot.