A Mercy is Toni Morrison’s eighth novel, and a tough one it is. An unrelenting condemnation of the vision of America as the second Eden, it posits instead a universe in which everyone is tainted with sin. It’s the 17th century and farmer Jacob Vaark and his wife Rebekkah head up a household of three servants, the black slave girl Florens, Native American Lina and Sorrow, the mentally unstable orphan of a shipwreck. Each of these characters has some saving grace, each has been or is a victim, but at the same time each is guilty. Woven together, their narratives suggest that America’s tragic past is inescapable, that our nation’s history is inescapably evil. This is an enormous thematic burden for such a small vehicle—A Mercy is very short and in many ways, especially with reference to character, undeveloped. Morrison’s vision seems encrypted, written in shorthand. Florens tells her story by carving the letters into the walls of her master’s abandoned house with a nail, a painful image that suggests the difficulty of storytelling, of telling the truth except by dint of unimaginable effort. None of this makes for easy reading in large part because the tone of doom is so unrelenting. In the end, when the meaning of the title becomes clear, it’s plain that mercy is used ironically as if there is no possibility of real mercy in this world. Certainly there is none in Morrison’s. To tell the truth, I can’t decide what I think about the book, which doesn’t matter except that I’m not sure a novel’s aim should be to befuddle its readers as this one does.

Eden’s Outcasts is just what its title says, The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. Matteson argues that father and daughter were inextricably bound together, that to understand one must know the other, and that for both of them, “life was a persistent but failed quest for perfection.” In their search “they inevitably discovered flaws both in the world and within themselves:” thus the title of the book. Unavoidably perhaps, the spotlight is mostly on Bronson Alcott, the sometimes admirable but often infuriating man whose daughter just happened to write a classic children’s book. For starters, he lived a long life whereas Louisa died young and suffered from ill health for much of her life. Yet by the end of the story she too looms large as a person and apersonality
Readers who enjoyed Geraldine Brooks’ March, a fictional version of the Alcott household that plays off Little Women, may well find Matteson’s biography superior to the novel. Sorry, comparisons are odious, but the richness of the real story of the impossible Bronson and his family is more intriguing than the fictional version. Matteson’s book is also head and shoulders above Susan Cheever’s superficial romp through the Transcendental households of Concord, American Bloomsbury. His analyses of the friendships and the intellectual connections between Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau are both thoughtful and convincing. But his tight focus on the Alcott household, including the ill-fated attempt to build an ideal community, Fruitlands, is what makes this book so readable. Throughout, I found myself torn between deep sympathy for Alcott and a strong desire to shake him, hard—this is how alive Matteson makes his main character.
Bronson’s penchant for taking his ideas to the extreme and his unworldly approach to practical affairs made life hard for the Alcotts, especially his long-suffering wife Abba. Everything became easier for them eventually, in large part because of the phenomenal success of Little Women. Louisa was always the one of the four sisters who concerned her father the most, right from the beginning, and yet was the most like him. The tale of her efforts to make a life for herself and to fill the family coffers is simultaneously heartbreaking and exhilarating. Finally, as a nurse in the Civil War, she ruined her health forever when, near death from typhoid, she was treated with a “medication” that included dangerous levels of mercury. But she went on to write Little Women and the works that followed it before ending her life as an invalid. She died three days before her father, having been born on his birthday, a coincident symbolic of the emotional and intellectual bonds that united them.