The Constant Reader

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.