Morrison and the Definitions of Home

Abstract

Morrison’s last two novels — A Mercy in 2008 and Home in 2012 — are comparatively short books. One of the reasons for their brevity is the author’s use of innovative and unusual structures. By choosing to center the reader’s attention on the language of each character, as she does in A Mercy, Morrison strips the narrative movement down to still focus points. Sometimes told by one of the other half dozen narrators but more often by Florens herself, the story of her great love for the blacksmith — as well as her enraged punishment of him — provides continuity that spins outward from a vortex of emotion. In Florens’ six sections of the 12-part narrative, over a third of the novel, she repeatedly provides for the reader the scene of her mother’s giving her away, as well as the account of what the blacksmith has done to her life. (No reader could distill the fabric of such earlier Morrison novels as Song of Solomon or Beloved into such a brief summary.)