2 excellent new novels, both set during the Korean War

From the Christian Science Monitor: 2 excellent new novels, both set during the Korean War

1. "Home," by Toni Morrison

Home, Morrison’s most recent novel after “A Mercy,” compresses her poetic skill and impressionistic abilities into 160 pages. Korean War veteran Frank Money has been back stateside for a year, grappling with post-traumatic stress disorder and too much alcohol, when he gets a letter from someone he’s never met, telling him: “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry.”
The she is Cee, his little sister and the first person he ever took care of. The two grew up in Lotus, Ga., “the worst place in the world, worse than any battlefield.” The Moneys moved there to live with their grandparents after white men “some in hoods, some not” gave everyone in their Texas town 24 hours to clear out. Their parents work two jobs, and so Cee and Frank are left to the abuse of their step-grandmother and the neglect of their grandfather.
When we first meet Frank, he’s handcuffed to a hospital bed in Seattle, pretending to be unconscious to avoid another dose of morphine. He’s been picked up by police for an incident he can’t remember, and suffers from episodes that start when all the color drains from the world. (And then there’s the specter in the blue zoot suit, who periodically appears to puzzle Frank and the reader. But Morrison has more on him later.)
Desperate to get to Cee, Frank escapes barefoot into the cold and a preacher helps get him started on his journey.
The novel intersperses italicized pages where Frank talks to the narrator with chapters from the point of view of everyone from Cee and their grandmother to the lover Frank left behind. As Frank gets closer to the hometown he loathes, he begins to confront his past horrors – more recently from Korea and more distantly from his childhood – and to recover some sense of himself.

 

2. The Coldest Night

In his earlier novels like “Coal Black Horse” and “Far Bright Star,” Olmstead made stark studies of the Civil War and the Mexican-American War.
Now, in The Coldest Night, Olmstead turns from 19th-century American conflicts to the Korean War, this time enlisting a protagonist who is a descendant of his previous protagonists. (Olmstead mentions “coal black horses” twice in his opening pages to get across the connection to his earlier work; unfortunately he leaves readers with a bleak image of the young boy who survived the Civil War as a 91-year-old whose entire family has fled his mountain. I could have lived without that sad epilogue as an introduction.)
Seventeen-year-old Henry Childs grew up in West Virginia, the only son of a single mom who worked as a nurse. He loved baseball and horses and Mercy, the daughter of a local judge. Mercy’s dad, however, wasn’t having any of it. Henry and Mercy run away together to New Orleans before her family can catch up with them, although – of course – they finally do.
Brokenhearted, Henry lies about his age and enlists in the Marines as a “hunter,” armed with a Browning automatic rifle. Like his ancestors, Henry is extremely good at soldiering, but it will take every milligram of skill he’s got to survive the Chosin Reservoir, a frozen nightmare of a battlefield Olmstead renders with epic skill.
The love story is, it must be said, the weakest part of “The Coldest Night.” Mercy isn’t nearly as fully realized a companion for Henry as is his fellow sniper, Lew, a World War II veteran from the same town in Charleston, W.Va.
But put Olmstead on a battlefield and stand back. The writing is powerful and the imagery stark. Readers will find that the forgotten war roars back to life again in the pages of Olmstead’s excellent novel.