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.
