'Home,' by Toni Morrison

HOME, by Toni Morrison. Alfred A. Knopf, 145 pp., $24.

"I was trying to take the scab off the '50s, the general idea of it as very comfortable, happy, nostalgic. Mad Men. Oh, please," Toni Morrison told an interviewer a few weeks ago. The Nobel Prize-winner was referring to her 10th and latest novel, the slender but resonant story of Frank Money, who returns from the Korean War so traumatized that home feels as much like a battleground as the one he just left. Which it is, for a 24-year-old black veteran trying to locate his manhood in 1950s America.

Frank has made it home without his homeboys, the two buddies he grew up with in Lotus, Georgia, who died before his eyes in Korea. He is "far too alive" to show himself back in Lotus, and anyway he hates the place: "Nobody in Lotus knew anything or wanted to learn anything." Discharged in Seattle, he's found refuge with Lily, whose arm across his chest at night somehow makes it easier to breathe.

A letter from Georgia sets him in motion again: "Come fast. She be dead if you tarry." "She" is his little sister Cee, innocent and abused, in whose sad eyes Frank once saw reflected the "strong good me" he has lost. Leaving his rescuer, Lily, he sets out to rescue Cee.

Morrison, now 81, has always resented critics who call her prose poetic. But no matter how muscular or earthy her vernacular, it is filled with images that lodge and linger. Frank leaves Lily's and walks straight into a fight that lands him on a mental ward, from which he escapes barefoot and barely clothed. A pastor's generosity eases his way; the socks he provides lie "folded neatly on the rug like broken feet," comfort edged with horror.

The bewitching flights of imagination that color Morrison's best-known work are muted here. There are no ghosts except the ones that haunt Frank's consciousness -- although that consciousness itself haunts the story. Italicized passages in Frank's voice interrupt and contradict the narrator, correcting and calling out. "I don't think you know much about love. Or me," Frank scolds. "You can keep on writing, but I think you ought to know what's true."

Frank's odyssey through the dangerous terrains of segregated America and his own battered mind is at the novel's heart. Cee's peril, at the hands of a "heavyweight Confederate" doctor who uses her as fodder for his eugenics research, is an odd gothic appendage. Safe back home in Lotus, Cee is healed by "country women who loved mean," who "handled sickness as though it were an affront, an illegal, invading braggart who needed whipping." The doctor and his strange household, the wise women of Lotus -- these are big characters in a small space, and you wish Morrison had let them expand. Instead, the novel hurtles forward to an improbably happy ending, in which loathed Lotus comes to seem "fresh and ancient, safe and demanding": no longer an island of indifference, but a fitting home for an odyssey's end. "Home" is a compressed epic, an uncomfortably tight container for Morrison's mastery.