The Power of Compression 
 I suspect that I would find this a wonderful book anyhow, but sometimes the context in which one reads enhances one's experience. Given this for Christmas yesterday, I read it eagerly overnight, as a break from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, at almost ten times the word count. I am enjoying the Tartt well enough, but I was immensely impressed by how much Toni Morrison can do with so little. I was also impressed by the simplicity of style she has reached in her older years. Her earlier masterpieces such as 
 Song of Solomon 
 and 
 Beloved 
 are novels of great power, but they are written in a complex narrative style reminiscent of Faulkner. Here however, I am reminded of a third winner of the Nobel Prize: John Steinbeck. Morrison has the same straightforward description of hardship one finds in The Grapes of Wrath, the same alternation of viewpoint in successive chapters, and above all the same poetic compression as Of Mice and Men. 
 The time is the early nineteen-fifties. Frank Money, a young soldier, has been discharged from the army at the conclusion of the Korean War, and must make his way down from the Pacific Northwest to rural Georgia, where his kid sister Cee is in some kind of trouble. The trouble is that Frank, who has seen his two hometown buddies killed in the war and witnessed other atrocities, is suffering from what we would now call PTSD. It has soured his live-in relationship with a local woman and caused run-ins with the police; he is under detention in a mental hospital when we first meet him. All this adds to the usual difficulties of an impoverished black man trying to make his way in a far-from-integrated country, especially when he is physically intimidating and dressed like a hobo. But he does find both grudging help and genuine kindness, enabling him to complete his Odyssey back to Lotus, Georgia--unincorporated, unimproved, but still his home. 
 Morrison gives us enough of Frank's journey to show the humiliations, the setbacks, and fits of rage, but she does not multiply incidents as a lesser writer might have done. Instead, she deepens the human context in every way possible. Every alternate chapter, for example, is a brief vignette from Frank's youth, told in his own voice with the immediacy of poetry. Read just the first three pages--a picture of two children sneaking under a fence through tall grass to wonder at some horses, and finding instead the trousered legs of a group of men burying a black man in an unmarked grave--read this, and see if you can avoid reading the rest of the book. You will find Frank's story for sure, and increasingly his wartime memories. And in between, you will find a remarkable gallery of female portraits: Frank's former girlfriend Lily; his sister Cee and her unwise marriage; their grandmother, Lenore, a mean woman when she first appears, but whom Morrison then goes back to paint in a more understandable light; and above all the community of God-fearing, tough-minded, healing women that make up the real population of Lotus and earn it the right to be called Home.