Novel Comments

Toni Morrison’s book Home( 2012) is certainly as vivid a rendering of post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by the Korean war as is available in literature. It is also a story about the home coming of a veteran who had left his hometown with adolescent contempt for its people and culture and returned to recognize their rich possibilities for healing and community. There was also a little man in a zoot suit who magically appeared and disappeared. I don’t know what he symbolized to Ms. Morrison. To me, he was another variation of the fiddler on the roof, an embodiment of the magic and vitality of life in spite of its tragedies