TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.
“A horrifying act stood at the center of Toni Morrison’s 1987
masterwork, Beloved: a runaway slave, caught in her effort to
escape, cuts the throat of her baby daughter with a handsaw,
determined to spare the girl the fate she herself has suffered as a
slave. A similarly indelible act stands at the center of Ms.
Morrison’s remarkable new novella, A Mercy, a small, plangent gem
of a story that is, at once, a kind of prelude to Beloved and a
variation on that earlier book’s exploration of the personal costs
of slavery–a system that moves men and women and children around
‘like checkers’ and casts a looming shadow over both parental and
romantic love.
Set some 200 years before Beloved, A Mercy conjures up the
beautiful, untamed, lawless world that was America in the 17th
century with the same sort of lyrical, verdant prose that
distinguished that earlier novel. . . . Ms. Morrison has
rediscovered an urgent, poetic voice that enables her to move back
and forth with immediacy and ease between the worlds of history and
myth, between ordinary daily life and the realm of fable. . . . A
heartbreaking account of lost innocence and fractured dreams,
[that] also stands, with Beloved, as one of Ms. Morrison’s most
haunting works yet.”
–Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Spellbinding . . . Dazzling . . . [A Mercy] stands alongside
Beloved as a unique triumph in Morrison’s body of work. The lush
poetry and amorphous structure of [the novel] reflect the story’s
distant setting in the mist of America’s creation, when
independence and the three-fifths compromise of the Constitution
were still a century away. . . . Morrison, who has written so
powerfully of catastrophe, cruelty and horror, here adds to that
song of tragedy equally thrilling chords of desire and wonder,
which in their own way are no less tragic. Where Beloved ends with
the cathartic exhaustion of an exorcism, A Mercy concludes with an
ambiguous kind of prayer, redolent with possibility and yearning
but inspired by despair. This rich little masterpiece is a welding
of poetry and history and psychological acuity that you must not
miss.”
–Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World
“Luminous and complex . . . In Beloved, Morrison told the story of
Sethe, a woman who murdered her own child rather than see her sold
into slavery. Early on in A Mercy, we watch a mother do the
opposite–she puts her daughter Florens up for sale . . . It’s a
less bloody moment, but in its way it’s no less chilling. A Mercy
is that daughter’s tale. . . . Morrison is mooting the perversely
hopeful possibility that slavery could have existed without racism
or at least without racism as we know it. She lavishes some of her
best writing in years on [A Mercy’s] pre-Revolutionary world . . .
A Mercy shows us America in the moment before race madness ruined
it–it is a wounded land, but the wound has not yet turned septic. .
. . In A Mercy, Morrison is urging her younger self, the tortured
soul who fashioned the infernal vision that is Beloved, to look
even further–beyond the veil of pain and anger, however righteous,
to hope. There was a time before the present misery, Morrison seems
to be telling herself. And therefore, maybe, there will be a time
after it.”
–Lev Grossman, Time
“Magnificent . . . As with all Morrison’s finest work, A Mercy
compellingly combines immediacy and obliquity. Its evocation of
pioneer existence in America surrounds you with sensuous intensity.
. . . An attack by a bear is described with thrilling power. . . .
Idioms have potent directness, too. . . . Rich knowledgeability
about 17th-century America is put to telling effect. Voices speak
to you as if you were there. . . . The book keeps you vividly aware
of the vital human individuality that racism’s crude
categorizations are brutally trying to iron out. . . . A stark
story of the evils of possessiveness and the perils of
dispossession emerges slantwise. Hints, suspicions, secrets,
ambivalences, scarcely acknowledged motives and barely noticeable
nuances serve as signposts to enormities and desperations: around
slavery’s large-scale uprootings, Morrison spotlights individual
instances of loss (orphans and outcasts are, as often in her
fiction, much in evidence; compensatory alliances they form are
warmly portrayed). A Mercy is so enthralling that you’ll want to
read it more than once. On each occasion, it further reveals itself
as a masterpiece of rewarding complexity.”
–Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times (London)
“In [A Mercy,] a mother chooses to give her daughter to a stranger,
the man who will ‘own’ her, in hopes that she’ll find a better
life. It is this act from which the book derives its title, but it
is, of course, an ambivalent gesture whose tragic resonance will be
slowly unveiled. . . . Morrison here is seeking some deeper truth
about what she once called ‘the presence of the unfree within the
heart of the democratic experiment.’ Some regard this novel as a
kind of prelude to Beloved, but the author has even more
provocative ideas at play. . . . In writing about the horror of
slavery, she finds a kind of ragged hope.”
–Renée Graham, Boston Sunday Globe
“[A Mercy] examines slavery through the prism of power, not race.
Morrison achieves this by setting A Mercy in 1680s America, when
slavery was a color-blind, equal-opportunity state of misery, not
yet the rigid, peculiar institution it would become. . . . Morrison
doesn’t write traditional novels so much as create a hypnotic state
of poetic intoxication. You don’t read A Mercy, you fall into a
miasma of language and symbolism. [It] offers an original vision of
America in its primeval state, where freedom was a rare
commodity.”
–Deirdre Donahue, USA Today
“[Toni Morrison] bound[s] into literature with her new book as if
it were the first time, with the spry energy of a doe. A Mercy . .
. is that beguiling and beautiful, that deftly condensed, that
sinewy with imaginative sentences, lyric flight and abundant human
sensitivity. . . . Finely hammered phrases repeatedly come off the
anvil, forming a story as powerful as the many she has shaped
before. Elements of this writer’s art from way back remain part of
her achievement here. Like a mighty telescope perched on a
contemporary plateau, Morrison draws in signals, moods, torments,
exhilarations from African American life and history . . . Morrison
mixes the verbal music of an era with idiosyncratic wisdom,
delivered indirectly rather than ex cathedra, recalling omniscient
Russian masters without imitating them. . . . Along the way come
moments whose artistry freezes one’s page-turning. Morrison’s
tactile reports rivet . . . What’s the opposite of ‘lazy’ in a
fiction writer’s style and research? Industrious? Indefatigable?
Morrison wears her knowledge lightly, yet every page exhibits her
control of [the 17th century’s] objects and artifacts, its worries
and dangers. She surrounds A Mercy’s more fanciful arabesques with
a broad border of realism. . . . A book as masterfully wrought as A
Mercy behooves its author to swagger. Go to it, Ms. Morrison.”
–Carlin Romano, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“A grand tragedy writ in miniature . . . Women, men, Africans,
Native Americans, whites, masters, slaves–all are cast into the
hard world that is the New World in Toni Morrison’s lustrous new
novel. In the same way, the Nobel Prize winner casts us into her
hypnotic, many-voiced narrative set in the 17th century in a nation
yet unformed. . . . We’re beguiled from the opening sentence:
‘Don’t be afraid.’ The speaker is Florens, black, barely out of
childhood, a slave but literate, whose eager-to-please ways and
lyrical language endear her to us and to the Virginia household of
Jacob Vaark. . . . The subject of [A Mercy] is slavery, and
[Morrison] brings to it, along with some of her most haunting
language, elements of history and mythos. . . . A Mercy is kindled
by characters who are complex and vulnerable, full of what she
describes in Beloved as ‘awful human power.’ . . . This novel’s
release coincides with the presidential election of Barack Obama, a
shining moment in our country’s history of which Morrison’s
characters can barely dream.”
–Ellen Kanner, The Miami Herald
“Themes of slavery and grief, of women’s struggles to escape the
bitterness of the captive world, are at the center of Morrison’s
work. They also lie at the heart of her new novel, A Mercy, which
looks to history [as in Beloved]–in this case, the 1680s and
1690s–to explore the agonies of slavery among the settlers of the
New World. Such a description makes Morrison’s novel sound far too
pat, however; it slights the poetry and breadth of her work. Yes, A
Mercy is about slavery, but in the most universal sense, meaning
the limits we place on ourselves as well as the confinements we
suffer at the hands of others. . . . [It is] a work of poetry and
intelligence, and a continuation of what John Updike has called
[Morrison’s] ‘noble and necessary fictional project of exposing the
infamies of slavery and the hardships of being African American.’
The story assumes even greater metaphorical power at this
particular moment, with the election of Barack Obama as our first
African American president.”
–Judith Freeman, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“[Morrison is] a conscious inheritor of America’s pastoral
tradition, even as she implicitly criticizes it. . . . In A Mercy,
a 17th-century American farmer–who lives near a town
wink-and-nudgingly called Milton–enriches himself by dabbling in
the rum trade and builds an ostentatious, oversize new house, for
which he orders up a fancy wrought-iron gate, ornamented with twin
copper serpents . . . [A Mercy] is [Morrison’s] deepest excavation
into America’s history, to a time when the South had just passed
laws that ‘separated and protected all whites from all others
forever,’ and the North had begun persecuting people accused of
witchcraft. . . . [A Mercy] isn’t a polemic–does anybody really
need to be persuaded that exploitation is evil?–but a tragedy in
which ‘to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest
dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of
yourself to another is a wicked thing.’ . . . No character in the
novel is wholly evil . . . Nor are the characters we root for
particularly saintly. . . . Everyone in A Mercy is damaged; a few,
once in a while, find strength to act out of love, or at least out
of mercy–that is, when those who have the power to do harm decide
not to exercise it. A negative virtue, but perhaps more lasting
than love. . . . The landscape of A Mercy is full of both beauties
and terrors: snow ‘sugars’ eyelashes, yet icicles hang like
‘knives’ . . . But whatever the glories and rigors of nature may
signify to the civilized, for these characters, living in the midst
of it, nature doesn’t signify. It’s simply to be embraced or
dreaded–like the people with whom they have to live. In Morrison’s
latest version of pastoral, it’s only mercy or the lack of it that
makes the American landscape heaven or hell, and the gates of Eden
open both ways at once.”
–David Gates, The New York Times Book Review (cover)
“Morrison’s short, magisterial new novel testifies to the art of a
writer able to conjure near-unimaginable lives sunk three centuries
ago in the infant American colonies . . . In the women of A Mercy,
Morrison returns to the meaning of human identity, its relationship
to community and the making and sundering of both. These questions
glint under the pressure slavery weighs on the New World. . . . A
Mercy is threaded with dreams and fever, sickness and ghosts,
menstrual blood and afterbirth–its authenticity lies quite apart
from archaeology. But that authenticity gathers over the
accumulation of pages, and final chapter . . . stings with
revelation. Morrison flings us into a dread past. But A Mercy pulls
us, shuddering, onto the banks of meaning.”
–Karen R. Long, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A Mercy captures the same crazy magic of Song of Solomon and
Beloved, Morrison’s most haunting, lyrical books. One doesn’t read
them so much as go digging for truths past tight and buried deep in
Morrison’s words. In part, it is the sheer mental work–the close
reading, the flipping back and forth between passages–that makes
her novels so satisfying. By the end, one feels as if one has
cracked a code. Or seen the light.”
–Maggie Galehouse, Houston Chronicle
“Three stars. Shimmering, even beautiful . . . A slim, somber fever
dream of a novel, Morrison’s [A Mercy] belies the tenderness of its
title. Set in the 1680s, her tale unfolds in the harsh northern
climes of an emergent America. Here, on Anglo-Dutch trader Jacob
Vaark’s isolated homestead, Vaark’s mail-order wife and three
female slaves struggle against great hardships while forming
shifting alliances that serve as the novel’s sole flickers of
redemption. . . . A Mercy abounds in near-biblical power and
grace.”
–Adriana Leshko, People
“Astonishing . . . A Mercy has both X-ray eyes and telepathic
powers, not to mention tree rings, ice caps, pottery clocks, carbon
clouds, a long memory, and a short fuse. It dreams its way back to
1682 and a primeval America before racial hierarchies had been
chiseled in stone . . . when ordinary men and women hoped that
courage alone would prove enough to win dominion over their rude
lives. The Dutch-born farmer and trader Jacob Vaark . . . will take
Florens, a little black girl in silly shoes, as partial payment of
a debt . . . What happens to ‘love-disabled’ Florens on Jacob’s
farm . . . is not a sentimental education. Nevertheless, illegally
literate, Florens will write it down for us to read aloud: ‘My
telling can’t hurt you in spite of what I have done,’ she says. But
it does. Like Pecola, Sula, Sethe, Consolata, Violet, and so many
other women we’ve met in Morrison’s pages, Florens is a siren,
pulling brave hearts overboard. . . . All adds up to a sensuous
omniscience that is practically Elizabethan.”
–John Leonard, Harper’s Magazine
“Memorable . . . lyrical . . . A miraculous tale of sorrow and
beauty. . . . It is 1682 in Maryland. The slave and rum trades are
dying in droves from European diseases, and most women live ‘of and
for men’ . . . But this place and time is also full of miracles and
mercies . . . American history, the natural world, and human desire
collide in a series of musical voices, distinct from one
another–unmistakably Morrisonian in their beauty and power–that
together tell this moving and morally complicated tale.”
–Pam Houston, O, The Oprah Magazine
“Toni Morrison mines the epic themes of race and class, love and
friendship, oppression and freedom–this time through the rarely
told tales of early colonists and the black slaves with whom they
lived. [A Mercy] is a page-turner, riveting and complex.”
–Marilyn Milloy, AARP Magazine
“Eerily resonant . . . A slender novel that plunges resoundingly
into the pre-history of black America to tell the interlocking
stories of three slavewomen and their mistress, [A Mercy] is as
linguistically rich and emotionally wrenching as [Morrison’s] best
work . . . The novel is an extended consideration of the many ways
in which people deliberately or unconsciously assert ownership over
each other: spouses, lovers, mothers and children. . . . What
Morrison is out to demonstrate is that slavery of any kind, even
the enslavement in passion, is dangerous to the soul. . . . The
horror of the central tragedy in A Mercy–the mother forced to
choose between her children–is not limited to the world of slavery.
It can be, and it has been, imagined in virtually any totalitarian
setting: the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, Darfur. (Is
slavery not a crude form of totalitarianism?) Likewise, there is
surely no more universalizing experience than motherhood, which
unites women regardless of their origins and their
circumstances.”
–Ruth Franklin, The New Republic
“A Mercy is a sinewy novel [that] contains passages of insight and
sensuality . . . It gathers its own power: Morrison plays a tight
game with the social, legal and personal connections between her
chess set of characters, a game in which each word–and every
detail–counts. . . . Morrison renders the ugly beautiful and the
unimaginable real: she is a fine teacher.”
–Heather Thompson, The Times Literary Supplement
“Toni Morrison’s books are epics of the failure of the country’s
conscience. [With A Mercy,] she goes back further in history than
her most searing and poetic novel, Beloved, to look at the
foundations of slavery in an America ‘before it was America.’ The
chances for mercy to thrive in a new land are weighed on a small
farm in New York. Four women who were acquired by
farmer-turned-trader Jacob Vaark in various ways have forged an
unlikely family . . . [Vaark’s] farm is a small collective of every
type of servitude possible years before the country turned
exclusively and implacably to the enslavement of black Africans. .
. . While the women are definitely the center of A Mercy, Morrison
offers a more complicated portrayal of a white male in Jacob Vaark.
An orphan himself, Jacob has a tendency to collect strays . . .
Like a dream deferred, if a mercy is hidden too long, it tends to
explode–as Morrison shows in her knockout final monologue. It’s a
spare, dark fable–and at under 200 pages, a swift, kaleidoscopic
trip into tragedy.”
–Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor
“Within [its] elegant structure, [A Mercy] returns to the great
theme of [Morrison’s] Pulitzer Prize—winning Beloved: slavery and
its tar pit of historical, political, and emotional implications. .
. . A Mercy has the intimacy and speed of a chamber piece while
still being impressively dense, like a small valise packed with
enough outfits for a month in the country. It parses sometimes
surprisingly fine distinctions between master and slave, male and
female, black and white (and brown). . . . Above all, A Mercy brims
with the omnipresence of the author’s questing, sifting brain,
which the reader can feel injecting each strand of the story,
subjecting it to the closest scrutiny before weaving it into the
whole. The result is both a compelling yarn and a meditation on the
varieties and degrees of enslavement and liberation; it is as
precise, taut and tough-minded as Morrison herself.”
–Kevin Nance, Poets & Writers (cover story)
“Stunning . . . A Mercy deserves to be counted alongside some of
[Morrison’s] most acclaimed novels, such as Sula and Beloved. The
stories in A Mercy are as layered and contested as the barely
mapped topology traversed by its characters. Set in the 1680s, when
this country’s reliance on slavery as an economic engine was just
beginning, A Mercy explores the repercussions of an enslaved
mother’s desperate act: She offers her small daughter to a stranger
in payment for her master's debt. . . . Readers familiar with
Morrison’s work will recognize its quietly chilling evocations of
the supernatural and depictions of powerful relationships among
women. A bride and her new husband’s female servant eye each other
with suspicion that mellows into genuine mutual affection. A
motherless child clings painfully to a childless mother.
Transformative maternity defines A Mercy, beginning and ending with
the devil’s bargain referred to in the title and explained in the
novel’s devastating conclusion.”
–Neda Ulaby, NPR
“Toni Morrison’s short and forceful new novel unfolds in a primeval
17th-century America, before the familiar, invidious social
institutions have taken root. Here, in a richly evoked land of
plenty [where] a high-minded farmer named Jacob Vaark briefly
presides over a small, peaceable kingdom of multiethnic lost souls
and orphans. . . . Strangely beautiful and bittersweet.”
–Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly
“Toni Morrison continues to delve into the reverberations of
slavery, motherhood, sacrifice and identity she wrote about in
Beloved. Yet in her new novel, A Mercy, she draws a closer
connection between how the past continues to be part of the present
and the future. . . . Readers will be buoyed by the power and
beauty of Morrison’s words and will need a breath to absorb the
timely implications of her stories about class, greed and
intolerance. . . . Toni Morrison gives us another layered vision of
the complicated character of America and how we survive.”
–Susanna Bullock, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Powerful . . . Morrison’s prose is richly lyrical, compressed,
intense. . . . Pulsing life [has been] imparted to her characters
and the wholly convincing world they inhabit. . . . [The narrator]
Florens and the blacksmith [she loves] generate much of the drama
in A Mercy, and much of the thematic punch, too. Abandoned and
betrayed as a child, Florens is a slave enslaved by love–love for a
free man who warns her, ‘Own yourself, woman’ . . . Her lover’s
advice [can be thought of] as a shout across the centuries. This is
what Toni Morrison has achieved: She has made the fate of her
characters seem like an echo, far off yet distinct, of our own
fate.”
–Adam Begley, New York Observer
“[A Mercy] reads like the ur-text for all [Morrison’s] previous
fiction. Coincidentally or not, it also offers a bookend to a
historic presidential candidacy that has prompted talk of a
‘post-racial’ society. A Mercy examines what might be called a
‘pre-racial’ America, the formative years at the end of the 17th
century when our forebears still had a chance of turning their
collective backs against slavery . . . [The narrator] Florens’
strange diction and obsession with the [man] she loves weave
hypnotically through the book. . . . Morrison vaults over America’s
legacy of victimizing women and minorities to claim the more
provocative turf that infuses much of her fiction. A Mercy tracks
the beginnings of a system of oppression by focusing on the
psychology of that oppression. . . . Powerful . . . Poetic.”
–Ellen Emry Heltzel, The Seattle Times
“Compelling . . . [A Mercy] slyly probes the roots of American
class and race resentment, and posits a plausible creation myth for
our enduring culture war. A Mercy unfolds, Rashomon—style, from
various points of view across multiple time frames. Primary
narrator Florens, a young slave in 1680s Maryland, has been sent to
fetch a free African blacksmith who was once employed by her farm
master, Dutch-English émigré Jacob Vaark, and with whom she’s
smitten. Florens’ perilous journey is contextualized by individual
chapters told from the perspectives of [the other residents of
Vaark’s farm] . . . Their ruminations reveal a melting pot seasoned
with a moral certitude and social withdrawal from the start. . . .
[The novel’s] power is in Morrison’s fluid, compassionate synthesis
of the plight of her band of outcasts, who come together but never
quite cohere. Four stars.”
–Mark Holcomb, Time Out New York
“Toni Morrison, the most important novelist of the last quarter
century, is still writing about life’s journeys: gut-wrenching
pain, sun-scraping triumph, and all the gunk in between . . . A
Mercy [is] a surprisingly tender story of a mother and daughter . .
. It’s like a spiritual prequel to Beloved.”
–Sean Fennessey, Vibe
“Luminous, virtuosic . . . A gripping story that shows the author
at the height of her magical-realist powers. Morrison makes us
sense unearthly visions in slavery’s grimmest origins, in mother’s
love’s power of sacrifice and in the gamut of moralities that
enabled some in the 18th century to subscribe to human bondage and
others to reject it.”
–Celia McGee, Town & Country
“Toni Morrison gives a different narrator to each chapter of [A
Mercy], and the effect is of a circling collage that cumulatively
forms a picture of pre-Revolutionary America. It’s a daring,
well-wrought concept . . . A Mercy does not contain a lot of pages,
but they are dense with meaning and the pain of a group of
disparate lives robbed of any kind of momentum, perhaps because
Morrison’s real subject is the birth of a new land, already corrupt
in its cradle.”
–Scott Eyman, Palm Beach Post
“In the 17th century, this country was a wild confederation of
colonies. . . . Fear and danger were matched only by the force of
determined survival. To describe this world requires more than mere
words, to live among society’s most downtrodden survivors takes
more than strength. To do this takes a powerful guide, a writer
like Toni Morrison, whose gift takes us into this world with A
Mercy. Morrison has perhaps delivered her greatest book yet, a book
so pared down to its essence that each staccato harmony passes by
in an instant but resonates long after. She drops us into a place
of darkness and uncertainty, slowly unfolding character and story,
ever aware of a parallel spirit world and a chorus of voices
following behind. . . . Morrison is a writer with a rare gift for
words that is only matched by her subtlety of plot. Her complex
characters allow for a painful intimacy . . . [A Mercy is] an
unforgettable and marking experience.”
–Adera Causey, Chattanooga Free Press
“A triumph . . . In [A Mercy,] Morrison takes you to a dark world
in which women, White or Black, have little power. In the American
wilderness of the late 1600s, danger has many faces. . . .
Gorgeously written and haunted.”
–The Arizona Republic
“[A Mercy] returns to the subject of slavery, [which Morrison] has
already mined with exquisite power. . . . [Here] she probes the
machine of slavery itself–the routine acts of closing deals and
settling debts by buying or selling human beings . . . Morrison
narrates the ways in which race, gender and class continue to color
our reading of slavery. She peers beneath the surface of the
machine to reveal its murky underpinnings in religious disputes.
She reminds us that although grace is unmerited favor and that a
mercy is an unmitigated blessing, it is no easy feat to understand
or even read about the consequences of either.”
–Marilyn Sanders Mobley, Ms.
“In this brutal, well-crafted story, Morrison offers a nuanced
explanation of a mercy that forgives those who enslave us, both
literally and emotionally.”
–Christina Saratsis, Marie Claire
“Florens is eight years old when she is sold away from her mother
and sixteen when she speaks the intriguing first lines of Toni
Morrison’s A Mercy: ‘Don’t be afraid.’ . . . Each character is as
precisely, lovingly drawn as those in Beloved. . . . This is a book
to read twice. First: eagerly, heart-in-your-throat, in desperation
for the wrenching finale. Second: slowly, lingering over Morrison’s
prose, which is probably the closest thing to true poetry you will
find in a modern novel . . . Our reaction to this newest historical
novel by the Nobel laureate is not, ‘What a shame this happened to
these long-dead, not-quite-real people, but ‘This could have been
me walking barefoot through a forest, giving birth on a riverbank.’
. . . A Mercy not only belongs on all of next year’s literary prize
shortlists, but on the bookshelf of all those who consider
themselves serious students of American history.”
–Stephanie Eve Boone, The Buffalo News
“Toni Morrison’s great gift is to blend the exotic and supernatural
with the homely and realistic. No character in a Morrison novel is
too meager to glisten with the magical dust of myth, legend, fairy
tale and folklore. A Mercy dives straight to the core of the
American myth. . . . Morrison has written a lean, poetic book that
is compacted with secrets and desires. Like the story itself, her
language is alternately spare and lush, often hopeful.”
–Catherine Holmes, The Charleston Post and Courier
“[Morrison] subtly exposes contradictions that have been part of
the American dream from the outset. If Beloved was written in a
prophet’s voice, A Mercy is the work of an elderly sage. Set in the
late 1600s along the Eastern Seaboard, Morrison’s novel centers on
the farm of an upwardly mobile immigrant, Jacob Vaark [who]
acquires a young slave named Florens in exchange for a debt. . . .
Vaark’s world may be the narrative stage throughout, but the
stories drift, Faulkner-like, through the different perspectives of
the characters, especially Florens. Morrison returns in the end to
the transaction that gave Florens to Vaark, and in a moving climax
recasts the coldness of the men’s negotiation as a mother’s gesture
of love–the title’s displaced mercy. . . . The poignancy [of this
moment] gets elevated by Morrison’s terse theological critique: ‘It
was not a miracle. Bestowed by god. It was a mercy. Offered by a
human.’ Slavery, needless to say, was flourishing in an overtly
Christian society, and in this staccato judgment Morrison damns
religion with its own best language. . . . A Mercy achieves a vivid
sense of time and place. . . . A wise, compelling novel whose
hopeful title is hard-won and shadowed hard by threats that are all
too familiar.”
–Todd Shy, Raleigh News & Observer
“Always engaging and lyrically written . . . I like being kept off
center [by Morrison’s novels], the text luring me in, slowly,
sinuously revealing mysteries and connections, one elaborate
revelation after another. We’re in Virginia in 1690 in this
sumptuously written novel, with its images from dreams, folklore,
visions, confrontations and incidents, amid a lush but dangerous
wilderness . . . Morrison explores in luminous detail all of [her]
characters’ attitudes, hopes, terrors and frustrations. . . . Such
a brief review must give short shrift to Morrison’s rich prose, the
lucid and poetic densities of her sentences and images. This
textual depth is more than half the fun of all her books, seducing
us with almost musical tones into the dark mysteries of the human
heart in our dark land of black and white.”
–Sam Coale, The Providence Journal
“More tone poem than unabashed fiction, [A Mercy is] a series of
emotional episodes revealing an ugly portrait of this country’s
earliest days. . . . Through it all is the very human ability to
survive, to endure unimaginable pain. . . . Morrison’s prose makes
it impossible to wallow in the story’s obvious misery. . . . Her
world [is] a savage realm that retains some beauty thanks to the
author’s staggering gifts.”
–Christian Toto, The Denver Post
“Breathtaking . . . Beguiling . . . Fast-moving and poignant. . . .
By concentrating on the denizens of one homestead, Morrison is able
to limn the entire disorder of early America. It’s one of the
reasons this short novel is so powerful–Morrison’s deep and
sympathetic focus on a handful of lives. Each chapter concentrates
on one character, and as the book unfolds, the story is revealed,
slowly, with magisterial grace. The end result is satisfying and
stirring. . . . The strength of A Mercy is Morrison’s lucid eye,
her uncanny ability to create character studies that are memorable
and that, through her lapidary approach, tell a tale that is
profound and important. In her hands, character is story. . . .
Like William Faulkner, Toni Morrison has honed a personal
experimental style that pays great attention to rhythm and diction.
Like Faulkner, she is understated and cerebral while creating
gothic grotesqueries in an agrarian setting. A Mercy, for all its
brevity, will be celebrated and discussed along with Morrison’s
best work.”
–Corey Mesler, Memphis Flyer Online
“Reaching back to 1682 on the Atlantic coast of America, Morrison
describes a dangerous Eden, a simmering, pungent stew of Angolan
slaves, transplanted London guttersnipes, Portuguese plantation
owners, Dutch traders and the pox-ridden remnants of original
peoples. . . . Morrison’s lush prose has always had a mesmeric
quality . . . The music and mystery of [her] language is still
abundant.”
–Janice P. Nimura, Newsday
“Smooth and alluring . . . There is hardship, injustice and misery
[in A Mercy]. But there is also hope and beauty–and mercy, in the
face of wrenching choices. And there is the poetic vibrance of
Morrison’s writing, especially in the voice of the semiliterate
Florens. . . . She lasts, as do the other characters in A
Mercy–they are a window into our past, and also into our
present.”
–Lisa McLendon, The Wichita Eagle
“As evocative and haunting as Beloved . . . Morrison recently told
National Public Radio that she sought in this novel to ‘remove race
from slavery.’ . . . By reminding us that many white Americans also
can trace their ancestry back to people who were enslaved, Morrison
has deepened our understanding of human history and the complex
legacy of slavery in America.”
–Emily Seelbinder, The Charlotte Observer
“I loved it. A Mercy is tender, brutal, quiet and urgent, with a
cast of characters that will make you forget you’re reading a
novel. . . . If you’re looking for a short novel that will, at the
end, make you want to turn around and experience it again, get A
Mercy and sacrifice some time. You won’t be sorry.”
–Terri Schlichenmeyer, The Philadelphia Tribune
“Like Armstrong hitting the mountain stages, [Toni Morrison] is in
the ‘zone.’ . . . There are an infinite number of stories in [A
Mercy], with each new character’s narrative throwing light onto
unexpected sides of the people we thought we knew. When Morrison
takes us into a world, we do not visit it; we inhabit it. . . . One
of her great skills is her uncanny ear; every voice is unique,
simultaneously sounding like both past and present. . . . Perhaps
the greatest pleasure of the book lies in drawing one in so
completely; there are no places where faulty construction hurls us
back into reality.”
–Elinor Teele, California Literary Review
“In 1690, Anglo-Dutch trader Jacob Vaark . . . reluctantly decides
to accept a young slave girl, Florens, as partial compensation [for
a debt]. Taken from her baby brother and her mother, who thinks
that giving up her daughter to a kinder slave owner is an act of
mercy, Florens finds herself in the midst of a community of women
striving to understand their burdens of sorrow and grief and to
discover the mercies of love. Much as she did in Paradise, Morrison
hauntingly weaves the stories of these women into a colorful tale
of loss, despair, hope, and love. . . . Magical, mystical, and
memorable, Morrison’s poignant parable of mercies hidden and
revealed belongs in every library.”
–Henry L. Carrigan, Library Journal (starred)
“Nobel laureate Morrison returns more explicitly to the net of pain
cast by slavery, a theme she detailed so memorably in Beloved. Set
at the close of the 17th century, [A Mercy] details America’s
untoward foundation: dominion over Native Americans, indentured
workers, women and slaves. A slave at a plantation in Maryland
offers up her daughter, Florens, to a relatively humane Northern
farmer, Jacob, as debt payment from their owner. The ripples of
this choice spread to the inhabitants of Jacob’s farm, populated by
women with intersecting and conflicting desires. . . . Morrison’s
lyricism infuses the shifting voices of her characters as they
describe a brutal society being forged in the wilderness.
Morrison’s unflinching narrative is all the more powerful for its
relative brevity; it takes hold of the reader and doesn’t let go
until the wrenching final-page crescendo.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Brilliant . . . Riveting, even poetic. . . . The time is the late
1600s, when what will become the U.S. remains a chain of colonies
along the Atlantic coast. Not only does slavery still exist, it is
a thriving industry that translates into plenty of business for
lots of people. . . . [Morrison] has shown a partiality for the
‘chorus’ method of storytelling, wherein a group of individuals who
are involved in a single event or incident tell their versions of
what happened, the individual voices maintaining their
distinctiveness while their personal tales overlap each other with
a layering effect that gives Morrison’s prose its resonance and
deep sheen of enameling. Here the voices belong to the women
associated with Virginia planter Jacob Vaark . . . these women
include the long-suffering Rebekka, his wife; Lina and Sorrow,
slave women with unique perspectives on the events taking place on
Vaark’s plantation; and Florens, a slave girl whom Vaark accepts as
partial payment on a debt and whose separation from her mother is
the pivotal event around which Morrison weaves her short but deeply
involving story. A fitting companion to her highly regarded
Beloved.”
–Brad Hooper, Booklist (starred)
“Abandonment, betrayal and loss are the themes of this latest
exploration of America’s morally compromised history from Morrison.
All of the characters she sets down in the colonial landscape circa
1690 are bereft, none more evidently so than Florens, 16-year-old
slave of Jacob Vaark and his wife Rebekka. . . . Jacob reluctantly
took Florens in settlement of a debt from a Maryland landowner. Her
own mother offered her–so as not to be traded with Florens’ infant
brother, the girl thinks. (The searing final monologue reveals it
was not so simple.) Florens joined a household of misfits somewhere
in the North. Jacob was a poor orphan who came to America to make a
new start; Rebekka’s parents essentially sold her to him to spare
themselves her upkeep. . . . They take in others similarly
devastated. Lina, raped by a ‘Europe,’ has been cast out by her
Native American tribe. Mixed-race Sorrow survived a shipwreck only
to be made pregnant by her rescuer . . . Willard and Scully are
indentured servants, farmed out to Jacob by their contract holders,
who keep fraudulently extending their time. . . . America was
founded on the involuntary servitude of blacks and whites, [and]
the colonies are rife with people who belong nowhere else and
anxiously strive to find something to hold onto in the New World.
[With] gorgeous language and a powerful understanding of the
darkest regions of the human heart . . . this allusive, elusive
little gem adds its own luster to the Nobel Laureate’s shimmering
body of work.”
–Kirkus Reviews
“An intimate, insightful, and surprisingly relevant look at the
ties that bind us in relationships.”
–Good Housekeeping
“Morrison’s storytelling genius is fully blooming in A Mercy, told
from the viewpoints of a number of characters, the most significant
being Florens, a young black slave. . . . Morrison creates a
magical voice for Florens that lifts readers up on a swirling arc
of prose, which makes all [her] despair and heartbreak almost
tolerable. Florens could be describing how Morrison captivates her
readers when she says ‘I can never not have you have me.’”
–Vick Mickunas, Dayton Daily News
“The fact that readers will be astonished by what they discover [in
17th-century Virginia] is a testament to how different that world
was from our own, and also to the author’s uncanny gift for
inhabiting the nuances of place, character and situation. . . .
Morrison weaves a rich tangle of human stories and interactions . .
. [She has created] a world filled with wonder that we have to
piece together for ourselves, out of the characters’ wildly
divergent partial impressions and imperfect understandings. By
requiring this act of imagination from her readers, Morrison
enriches the experience and brings it closer in, sometimes so close
it seems to jump off the page.”
–Peter Magnani, San Jose Mercury News
“[Morrison] negotiates the twisted intersection of race, class and
gender in America better and more fully than any writer has ever
done. A Mercy, continues this journey, following the tangled
threads of our history all the way back to the beginning, when the
very idea of America was still struggling to be born. The result is
Morrison’s best novel since Beloved. . . . Using her trademark
kaleidoscopic approach, Morrison allows [her] characters to unspool
their unique stories [which] succeed in depicting complicated,
conflicted beings. . . . The overarching lesson of A Mercy is that
history is not foreordained. In an ending that both echoes and
diverges from the infanticide hanging over Beloved, we watch
another mother make a very different and more hopeful choice
regarding her daughter’s fate. In its repeated insistence that such
choice is possible, A Mercy not only transcends a monolithic and
static view of slavery, racism and the American past. It also pays
homage to our collective power to imagine a better future.”
–Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
“Achingly beautiful . . . A Mercy reads like poetry, with vivid
descriptions and emotional dialogue. . . . It is full of sorrow,
sacrifice and pain. But it ends with a ray of light, a description
of the ultimate mercy.”
–Laura L. Hutchinson, Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star
“Morrison is a woman whose stories find transcendence in even the
darkest periods of history. Her latest novel, A Mercy, casts an
unflinching eye on slave trade in the 17th century. It’s
heartbreaking, luminous, and a solemn reminder of our nation’s
history.”
–Redbook
“A Mercy takes on slavery in its infancy and reveals what lies
beneath the surface. It’s an ambivalent and disturbing story,
sparingly written, including rejection, abandonment and acts of
mercy with unforeseen consequences.”
–Ebony
“Morrison is as good as her many awards say. . . . Her use of
language . . . makes you feel the emotion of the characters,
demanding understanding and sympathy, not letting you avoid it with
the explanation ‘it’s only a story.’ A Mercy is an outstanding
addition to Morrison’s list, probably destined for the next ‘best
work of American fiction poll’ in 2020.”
–Sacramento Book Review
Some authors make mediocre readers, but Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison is certainly not among them. Her husky voice, lyrical rhythms and precise timing--especially of pauses within sentences or even phrases--give clarity and poignancy to her vivid metaphors and elegant prose. Set in the 1680s, this story tells of multiple forms of love and of slavery. Florens is a slave girl whose mother urges her sale to Jacob, a decent man, to save her from a rapist master. Florens feels abandoned and is finally betrayed by the lover she worships. Morrison holds the listener completely in thrall through her narrative, her characters, her language and her own fine reading. An enlightening interview with the author appears at the end. A Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 15). (Nov.) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.
"A horrifying act stood at the center of Toni Morrison's 1987
masterwork, Beloved: a runaway slave, caught in her effort
to escape, cuts the throat of her baby daughter with a handsaw,
determined to spare the girl the fate she herself has suffered as a
slave. A similarly indelible act stands at the center of Ms.
Morrison's remarkable new novella, A Mercy, a small,
plangent gem of a story that is, at once, a kind of prelude to
Beloved and a variation on that earlier book's exploration
of the personal costs of slavery-a system that moves men and women
and children around 'like checkers' and casts a looming shadow over
both parental and romantic love.
Set some 200 years before Beloved, A Mercy conjures
up the beautiful, untamed, lawless world that was America in the
17th century with the same sort of lyrical, verdant prose that
distinguished that earlier novel. . . . Ms. Morrison has
rediscovered an urgent, poetic voice that enables her to move back
and forth with immediacy and ease between the worlds of history and
myth, between ordinary daily life and the realm of fable. . . . A
heartbreaking account of lost innocence and fractured dreams,
[that] also stands, with Beloved, as one of Ms. Morrison's
most haunting works yet."
-Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Spellbinding . . . Dazzling . . . [A Mercy] stands
alongside Beloved as a unique triumph in Morrison's body of
work. The lush poetry and amorphous structure of [the novel]
reflect the story's distant setting in the mist of America's
creation, when independence and the three-fifths compromise of the
Constitution were still a century away. . . . Morrison, who has
written so powerfully of catastrophe, cruelty and horror, here adds
to that song of tragedy equally thrilling chords of desire and
wonder, which in their own way are no less tragic. Where
Beloved ends with the cathartic exhaustion of an exorcism,
A Mercy concludes with an ambiguous kind of prayer, redolent
with possibility and yearning but inspired by despair. This rich
little masterpiece is a welding of poetry and history and
psychological acuity that you must not miss."
-Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World
"Luminous and complex . . . In Beloved, Morrison told the
story of Sethe, a woman who murdered her own child rather than see
her sold into slavery. Early on in A Mercy, we watch a
mother do the opposite-she puts her daughter Florens up for sale .
. . It's a less bloody moment, but in its way it's no less
chilling. A Mercy is that daughter's tale. . . . Morrison is
mooting the perversely hopeful possibility that slavery could have
existed without racism or at least without racism as we know it.
She lavishes some of her best writing in years on [A
Mercy's] pre-Revolutionary world . . . A Mercy shows us
America in the moment before race madness ruined it-it is a wounded
land, but the wound has not yet turned septic. . . . In A
Mercy, Morrison is urging her younger self, the tortured soul
who fashioned the infernal vision that is Beloved, to look
even further-beyond the veil of pain and anger, however righteous,
to hope. There was a time before the present misery, Morrison seems
to be telling herself. And therefore, maybe, there will be a time
after it."
-Lev Grossman, Time
"Magnificent . . . As with all Morrison's finest work, A
Mercy compellingly combines immediacy and obliquity. Its
evocation of pioneer existence in America surrounds you with
sensuous intensity. . . . An attack by a bear is described with
thrilling power. . . . Idioms have potent directness, too. . . .
Rich knowledgeability about 17th-century America is put to telling
effect. Voices speak to you as if you were there. . . . The book
keeps you vividly aware of the vital human individuality that
racism's crude categorizations are brutally trying to iron out. . .
. A stark story of the evils of possessiveness and the perils of
dispossession emerges slantwise. Hints, suspicions, secrets,
ambivalences, scarcely acknowledged motives and barely noticeable
nuances serve as signposts to enormities and desperations: around
slavery's large-scale uprootings, Morrison spotlights individual
instances of loss (orphans and outcasts are, as often in her
fiction, much in evidence; compensatory alliances they form are
warmly portrayed). A Mercy is so enthralling that you'll
want to read it more than once. On each occasion, it further
reveals itself as a masterpiece of rewarding complexity."
-Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times (London)
"In [A Mercy,] a mother chooses to give her daughter to a
stranger, the man who will 'own' her, in hopes that she'll find a
better life. It is this act from which the book derives its title,
but it is, of course, an ambivalent gesture whose tragic resonance
will be slowly unveiled. . . . Morrison here is seeking some deeper
truth about what she once called 'the presence of the unfree within
the heart of the democratic experiment.' Some regard this novel as
a kind of prelude to Beloved, but the author has even more
provocative ideas at play. . . . In writing about the horror of
slavery, she finds a kind of ragged hope."
-Renee Graham, Boston Sunday Globe
"[A Mercy] examines slavery through the prism of power, not
race. Morrison achieves this by setting A Mercy in 1680s
America, when slavery was a color-blind, equal-opportunity state of
misery, not yet the rigid, peculiar institution it would become. .
. . Morrison doesn't write traditional novels so much as create a
hypnotic state of poetic intoxication. You don't read A
Mercy, you fall into a miasma of language and symbolism. [It]
offers an original vision of America in its primeval state, where
freedom was a rare commodity."
-Deirdre Donahue, USA Today
"[Toni Morrison] bound[s] into literature with her new book as if
it were the first time, with the spry energy of a doe. A
Mercy . . . is that beguiling and beautiful, that deftly
condensed, that sinewy with imaginative sentences, lyric flight and
abundant human sensitivity. . . . Finely hammered phrases
repeatedly come off the anvil, forming a story as powerful as the
many she has shaped before. Elements of this writer's art from way
back remain part of her achievement here. Like a mighty telescope
perched on a contemporary plateau, Morrison draws in signals,
moods, torments, exhilarations from African American life and
history . . . Morrison mixes the verbal music of an era with
idiosyncratic wisdom, delivered indirectly rather than ex cathedra,
recalling omniscient Russian masters without imitating them. . . .
Along the way come moments whose artistry freezes one's
page-turning. Morrison's tactile reports rivet . . . What's the
opposite of 'lazy' in a fiction writer's style and research?
Industrious? Indefatigable? Morrison wears her knowledge lightly,
yet every page exhibits her control of [the 17th century's] objects
and artifacts, its worries and dangers. She surrounds A
Mercy's more fanciful arabesques with a broad border of
realism. . . . A book as masterfully wrought as A Mercy
behooves its author to swagger. Go to it, Ms. Morrison."
-Carlin Romano, The Philadelphia Inquirer
"A grand tragedy writ in miniature . . . Women, men, Africans,
Native Americans, whites, masters, slaves-all are cast into the
hard world that is the New World in Toni Morrison's lustrous new
novel. In the same way, the Nobel Prize winner casts us into her
hypnotic, many-voiced narrative set in the 17th century in a nation
yet unformed. . . . We're beguiled from the opening sentence:
'Don't be afraid.' The speaker is Florens, black, barely out of
childhood, a slave but literate, whose eager-to-please ways and
lyrical language endear her to us and to the Virginia household of
Jacob Vaark. . . . The subject of [A Mercy] is slavery, and
[Morrison] brings to it, along with some of her most haunting
language, elements of history and mythos. . . . A Mercy is
kindled by characters who are complex and vulnerable, full of what
she describes in Beloved as 'awful human power.' . . . This
novel's release coincides with the presidential election of Barack
Obama, a shining moment in our country's history of which
Morrison's characters can barely dream."
-Ellen Kanner, The Miami Herald
"Themes of slavery and grief, of women's struggles to escape the
bitterness of the captive world, are at the center of Morrison's
work. They also lie at the heart of her new novel, A Mercy,
which looks to history [as in Beloved]-in this case, the
1680s and 1690s-to explore the agonies of slavery among the
settlers of the New World. Such a description makes Morrison's
novel sound far too pat, however; it slights the poetry and breadth
of her work. Yes, A Mercy is about slavery, but in the most
universal sense, meaning the limits we place on ourselves as well
as the confinements we suffer at the hands of others. . . . [It is]
a work of poetry and intelligence, and a continuation of what John
Updike has called [Morrison's] 'noble and necessary fictional
project of exposing the infamies of slavery and the hardships of
being African American.' The story assumes even greater
metaphorical power at this particular moment, with the election of
Barack Obama as our first African American president."
-Judith Freeman, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[Morrison is] a conscious inheritor of America's pastoral
tradition, even as she implicitly criticizes it. . . . In A
Mercy, a 17th-century American farmer-who lives near a town
wink-and-nudgingly called Milton-enriches himself by dabbling in
the rum trade and builds an ostentatious, oversize new house, for
which he orders up a fancy wrought-iron gate, ornamented with twin
copper serpents . . . [A Mercy] is [Morrison's] deepest
excavation into America's history, to a time when the South had
just passed laws that 'separated and protected all whites from all
others forever,' and the North had begun persecuting people accused
of witchcraft. . . . [A Mercy] isn't a polemic-does anybody
really need to be persuaded that exploitation is evil?-but a
tragedy in which 'to be given dominion over another is a hard
thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give
dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.' . . . No
character in the novel is wholly evil . . . Nor are the characters
we root for particularly saintly. . . . Everyone in A Mercy
is damaged; a few, once in a while, find strength to act out of
love, or at least out of mercy-that is, when those who have the
power to do harm decide not to exercise it. A negative virtue, but
perhaps more lasting than love. . . . The landscape of A
Mercy is full of both beauties and terrors: snow 'sugars'
eyelashes, yet icicles hang like 'knives' . . . But whatever the
glories and rigors of nature may signify to the civilized, for
these characters, living in the midst of it, nature doesn't
signify. It's simply to be embraced or dreaded-like the people with
whom they have to live. In Morrison's latest version of pastoral,
it's only mercy or the lack of it that makes the American landscape
heaven or hell, and the gates of Eden open both ways at once."
-David Gates, The New York Times Book Review (cover)
"Morrison's short, magisterial new novel testifies to the art of a
writer able to conjure near-unimaginable lives sunk three centuries
ago in the infant American colonies . . . In the women of A
Mercy, Morrison returns to the meaning of human identity, its
relationship to community and the making and sundering of both.
These questions glint under the pressure slavery weighs on the New
World. . . . A Mercy is threaded with dreams and fever,
sickness and ghosts, menstrual blood and afterbirth-its
authenticity lies quite apart from archaeology. But that
authenticity gathers over the accumulation of pages, and final
chapter . . . stings with revelation. Morrison flings us into a
dread past. But A Mercy pulls us, shuddering, onto the banks
of meaning."
-Karen R. Long, Cleveland Plain Dealer
"A Mercy captures the same crazy magic of Song of
Solomon and Beloved, Morrison's most haunting, lyrical
books. One doesn't read them so much as go digging for truths past
tight and buried deep in Morrison's words. In part, it is the sheer
mental work-the close reading, the flipping back and forth between
passages-that makes her novels so satisfying. By the end, one feels
as if one has cracked a code. Or seen the light."
-Maggie Galehouse, Houston Chronicle
"Three stars. Shimmering, even beautiful . . . A slim, somber fever
dream of a novel, Morrison's [A Mercy] belies the tenderness
of its title. Set in the 1680s, her tale unfolds in the harsh
northern climes of an emergent America. Here, on Anglo-Dutch trader
Jacob Vaark's isolated homestead, Vaark's mail-order wife and three
female slaves struggle against great hardships while forming
shifting alliances that serve as the novel's sole flickers of
redemption. . . . A Mercy abounds in near-biblical power and
grace."
-Adriana Leshko, People
"Astonishing . . . A Mercy has both X-ray eyes and
telepathic powers, not to mention tree rings, ice caps, pottery
clocks, carbon clouds, a long memory, and a short fuse. It dreams
its way back to 1682 and a primeval America before racial
hierarchies had been chiseled in stone . . . when ordinary men and
women hoped that courage alone would prove enough to win dominion
over their rude lives. The Dutch-born farmer and trader Jacob Vaark
. . . will take Florens, a little black girl in silly shoes, as
partial payment of a debt . . . What happens to 'love-disabled'
Florens on Jacob's farm . . . is not a sentimental education.
Nevertheless, illegally literate, Florens will write it down for us
to read aloud: 'My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I have
done,' she says. But it does. Like Pecola, Sula, Sethe, Consolata,
Violet, and so many other women we've met in Morrison's pages,
Florens is a siren, pulling brave hearts overboard. . . . All adds
up to a sensuous omniscience that is practically Elizabethan."
-John Leonard, Harper's Magazine
"Memorable . . . lyrical . . . A miraculous tale of sorrow and
beauty. . . . It is 1682 in Maryland. The slave and rum trades are
dying in droves from European diseases, and most women live 'of and
for men' . . . But this place and time is also full of miracles and
mercies . . . American history, the natural world, and human desire
collide in a series of musical voices, distinct from one
another-unmistakably Morrisonian in their beauty and power-that
together tell this moving and morally complicated tale."
-Pam Houston, O, The Oprah Magazine
"Toni Morrison mines the epic themes of race and class, love and
friendship, oppression and freedom-this time through the rarely
told tales of early colonists and the black slaves with whom they
lived. [A Mercy] is a page-turner, riveting and
complex."
-Marilyn Milloy, AARP Magazine
"Eerily resonant . . . A slender novel that plunges resoundingly
into the pre-history of black America to tell the interlocking
stories of three slavewomen and their mistress, [A Mercy] is
as linguistically rich and emotionally wrenching as [Morrison's]
best work . . . The novel is an extended consideration of the many
ways in which people deliberately or unconsciously assert ownership
over each other: spouses, lovers, mothers and children. . . . What
Morrison is out to demonstrate is that slavery of any kind, even
the enslavement in passion, is dangerous to the soul. . . . The
horror of the central tragedy in A Mercy-the mother forced
to choose between her children-is not limited to the world of
slavery. It can be, and it has been, imagined in virtually any
totalitarian setting: the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution,
Darfur. (Is slavery not a crude form of totalitarianism?) Likewise,
there is surely no more universalizing experience than motherhood,
which unites women regardless of their origins and their
circumstances."
-Ruth Franklin, The New Republic
"A Mercy is a sinewy novel [that] contains passages of
insight and sensuality . . . It gathers its own power: Morrison
plays a tight game with the social, legal and personal connections
between her chess set of characters, a game in which each word-and
every detail-counts. . . . Morrison renders the ugly beautiful and
the unimaginable real: she is a fine teacher."
-Heather Thompson, The Times Literary Supplement
"Toni Morrison's books are epics of the failure of the country's
conscience. [With A Mercy,] she goes back further in history
than her most searing and poetic novel, Beloved, to look at
the foundations of slavery in an America 'before it was America.'
The chances for mercy to thrive in a new land are weighed on a
small farm in New York. Four women who were acquired by
farmer-turned-trader Jacob Vaark in various ways have forged an
unlikely family . . . [Vaark's] farm is a small collective of every
type of servitude possible years before the country turned
exclusively and implacably to the enslavement of black Africans. .
. . While the women are definitely the center of A Mercy,
Morrison offers a more complicated portrayal of a white male in
Jacob Vaark. An orphan himself, Jacob has a tendency to collect
strays . . . Like a dream deferred, if a mercy is hidden too long,
it tends to explode-as Morrison shows in her knockout final
monologue. It's a spare, dark fable-and at under 200 pages, a
swift, kaleidoscopic trip into tragedy."
-Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor
"Within [its] elegant structure, [A Mercy] returns to the
great theme of [Morrison's] Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved:
slavery and its tar pit of historical, political, and emotional
implications. . . . A Mercy has the intimacy and speed of a
chamber piece while still being impressively dense, like a small
valise packed with enough outfits for a month in the country. It
parses sometimes surprisingly fine distinctions between master and
slave, male and female, black and white (and brown). . . . Above
all, A Mercy brims with the omnipresence of the author's
questing, sifting brain, which the reader can feel injecting each
strand of the story, subjecting it to the closest scrutiny before
weaving it into the whole. The result is both a compelling yarn and
a meditation on the varieties and degrees of enslavement and
liberation; it is as precise, taut and tough-minded as Morrison
herself."
-Kevin Nance, Poets & Writers (cover story)
"Stunning . . . A Mercy deserves to be counted alongside
some of [Morrison's] most acclaimed novels, such as Sula and
Beloved. The stories in A Mercy are as layered and
contested as the barely mapped topology traversed by its
characters. Set in the 1680s, when this country's reliance on
slavery as an economic engine was just beginning, A Mercy
explores the repercussions of an enslaved mother's desperate act:
She offers her small daughter to a stranger in payment for her
master's debt. . . . Readers familiar with Morrison's work will
recognize its quietly chilling evocations of the supernatural and
depictions of powerful relationships among women. A bride and her
new husband's female servant eye each other with suspicion that
mellows into genuine mutual affection. A motherless child clings
painfully to a childless mother. Transformative maternity defines
A Mercy, beginning and ending with the devil's bargain
referred to in the title and explained in the novel's devastating
conclusion."
-Neda Ulaby, NPR
"Toni Morrison's short and forceful new novel unfolds in a primeval
17th-century America, before the familiar, invidious social
institutions have taken root. Here, in a richly evoked land of
plenty [where] a high-minded farmer named Jacob Vaark briefly
presides over a small, peaceable kingdom of multiethnic lost souls
and orphans. . . . Strangely beautiful and bittersweet."
-Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly
"Toni Morrison continues to delve into the reverberations of
slavery, motherhood, sacrifice and identity she wrote about in
Beloved. Yet in her new novel, A Mercy, she draws a
closer connection between how the past continues to be part of the
present and the future. . . . Readers will be buoyed by the power
and beauty of Morrison's words and will need a breath to absorb the
timely implications of her stories about class, greed and
intolerance. . . . Toni Morrison gives us another layered vision of
the complicated character of America and how we survive."
-Susanna Bullock, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Powerful . . . Morrison's prose is richly lyrical, compressed,
intense. . . . Pulsing life [has been] imparted to her characters
and the wholly convincing world they inhabit. . . . [The narrator]
Florens and the blacksmith [she loves] generate much of the drama
in A Mercy, and much of the thematic punch, too. Abandoned
and betrayed as a child, Florens is a slave enslaved by love-love
for a free man who warns her, 'Own yourself, woman' . . . Her
lover's advice [can be thought of] as a shout across the centuries.
This is what Toni Morrison has achieved: She has made the fate of
her characters seem like an echo, far off yet distinct, of our own
fate."
-Adam Begley, New York Observer
"[A Mercy] reads like the ur-text for all [Morrison's]
previous fiction. Coincidentally or not, it also offers a bookend
to a historic presidential candidacy that has prompted talk of a
'post-racial' society. A Mercy examines what might be called
a 'pre-racial' America, the formative years at the end of the 17th
century when our forebears still had a chance of turning their
collective backs against slavery . . . [The narrator] Florens'
strange diction and obsession with the [man] she loves weave
hypnotically through the book. . . . Morrison vaults over America's
legacy of victimizing women and minorities to claim the more
provocative turf that infuses much of her fiction. A Mercy
tracks the beginnings of a system of oppression by focusing on the
psychology of that oppression. . . . Powerful . . . Poetic."
-Ellen Emry Heltzel, The Seattle Times
"Compelling . . . [A Mercy] slyly probes the roots of
American class and race resentment, and posits a plausible creation
myth for our enduring culture war. A Mercy unfolds,
Rashomon-style, from various points of view across multiple
time frames. Primary narrator Florens, a young slave in 1680s
Maryland, has been sent to fetch a free African blacksmith who was
once employed by her farm master, Dutch-English emigre Jacob Vaark,
and with whom she's smitten. Florens' perilous journey is
contextualized by individual chapters told from the perspectives of
[the other residents of Vaark's farm] . . . Their ruminations
reveal a melting pot seasoned with a moral certitude and social
withdrawal from the start. . . . [The novel's] power is in
Morrison's fluid, compassionate synthesis of the plight of her band
of outcasts, who come together but never quite cohere. Four
stars."
-Mark Holcomb, Time Out New York
"Toni Morrison, the most important novelist of the last quarter
century, is still writing about life's journeys: gut-wrenching
pain, sun-scraping triumph, and all the gunk in between . . . A
Mercy [is] a surprisingly tender story of a mother and daughter
. . . It's like a spiritual prequel to Beloved."
-Sean Fennessey, Vibe
"Luminous, virtuosic . . . A gripping story that shows the author
at the height of her magical-realist powers. Morrison makes us
sense unearthly visions in slavery's grimmest origins, in mother's
love's power of sacrifice and in the gamut of moralities that
enabled some in the 18th century to subscribe to human bondage and
others to reject it."
-Celia McGee, Town & Country
"Toni Morrison gives a different narrator to each chapter of [A
Mercy], and the effect is of a circling collage that
cumulatively forms a picture of pre-Revolutionary America. It's a
daring, well-wrought concept . . . A Mercy does not contain
a lot of pages, but they are dense with meaning and the pain of a
group of disparate lives robbed of any kind of momentum, perhaps
because Morrison's real subject is the birth of a new land, already
corrupt in its cradle."
-Scott Eyman, Palm Beach Post
"In the 17th century, this country was a wild confederation of
colonies. . . . Fear and danger were matched only by the force of
determined survival. To describe this world requires more than mere
words, to live among society's most downtrodden survivors takes
more than strength. To do this takes a powerful guide, a writer
like Toni Morrison, whose gift takes us into this world with A
Mercy. Morrison has perhaps delivered her greatest book yet, a
book so pared down to its essence that each staccato harmony passes
by in an instant but resonates long after. She drops us into a
place of darkness and uncertainty, slowly unfolding character and
story, ever aware of a parallel spirit world and a chorus of voices
following behind. . . . Morrison is a writer with a rare gift for
words that is only matched by her subtlety of plot. Her complex
characters allow for a painful intimacy . . . [A Mercy is]
an unforgettable and marking experience."
-Adera Causey, Chattanooga Free Press
"A triumph . . . In [A Mercy,] Morrison takes you to a dark
world in which women, White or Black, have little power. In the
American wilderness of the late 1600s, danger has many faces. . . .
Gorgeously written and haunted."
-The Arizona Republic
"[A Mercy] returns to the subject of slavery, [which
Morrison] has already mined with exquisite power. . . . [Here] she
probes the machine of slavery itself-the routine acts of closing
deals and settling debts by buying or selling human beings . . .
Morrison narrates the ways in which race, gender and class continue
to color our reading of slavery. She peers beneath the surface of
the machine to reveal its murky underpinnings in religious
disputes. She reminds us that although grace is unmerited favor and
that a mercy is an unmitigated blessing, it is no easy feat to
understand or even read about the consequences of either."
-Marilyn Sanders Mobley, Ms.
"In this brutal, well-crafted story, Morrison offers a nuanced
explanation of a mercy that forgives those who enslave us, both
literally and emotionally."
-Christina Saratsis, Marie Claire
"Florens is eight years old when she is sold away from her mother
and sixteen when she speaks the intriguing first lines of Toni
Morrison's A Mercy: 'Don't be afraid.' . . . Each character
is as precisely, lovingly drawn as those in Beloved. . . .
This is a book to read twice. First: eagerly, heart-in-your-throat,
in desperation for the wrenching finale. Second: slowly, lingering
over Morrison's prose, which is probably the closest thing to true
poetry you will find in a modern novel . . . Our reaction to this
newest historical novel by the Nobel laureate is not, 'What a shame
this happened to these long-dead, not-quite-real people, but 'This
could have been me walking barefoot through a forest, giving birth
on a riverbank.' . . . A Mercy not only belongs on all of
next year's literary prize shortlists, but on the bookshelf of all
those who consider themselves serious students of American
history."
-Stephanie Eve Boone, The Buffalo News
"Toni Morrison's great gift is to blend the exotic and supernatural
with the homely and realistic. No character in a Morrison novel is
too meager to glisten with the magical dust of myth, legend, fairy
tale and folklore. A Mercy dives straight to the core of the
American myth. . . . Morrison has written a lean, poetic book that
is compacted with secrets and desires. Like the story itself, her
language is alternately spare and lush, often hopeful."
-Catherine Holmes, The Charleston Post and Courier
"[Morrison] subtly exposes contradictions that have been part of
the American dream from the outset. If Beloved was written
in a prophet's voice, A Mercy is the work of an elderly
sage. Set in the late 1600s along the Eastern Seaboard, Morrison's
novel centers on the farm of an upwardly mobile immigrant, Jacob
Vaark [who] acquires a young slave named Florens in exchange for a
debt. . . . Vaark's world may be the narrative stage throughout,
but the stories drift, Faulkner-like, through the different
perspectives of the characters, especially Florens. Morrison
returns in the end to the transaction that gave Florens to Vaark,
and in a moving climax recasts the coldness of the men's
negotiation as a mother's gesture of love-the title's displaced
mercy. . . . The poignancy [of this moment] gets elevated by
Morrison's terse theological critique: 'It was not a miracle.
Bestowed by god. It was a mercy. Offered by a human.' Slavery,
needless to say, was flourishing in an overtly Christian society,
and in this staccato judgment Morrison damns religion with its own
best language. . . . A Mercy achieves a vivid sense of time
and place. . . . A wise, compelling novel whose hopeful title is
hard-won and shadowed hard by threats that are all too
familiar."
-Todd Shy, Raleigh News & Observer
"Always engaging and lyrically written . . . I like being kept off
center [by Morrison's novels], the text luring me in, slowly,
sinuously revealing mysteries and connections, one elaborate
revelation after another. We're in Virginia in 1690 in this
sumptuously written novel, with its images from dreams, folklore,
visions, confrontations and incidents, amid a lush but dangerous
wilderness . . . Morrison explores in luminous detail all of [her]
characters' attitudes, hopes, terrors and frustrations. . . . Such
a brief review must give short shrift to Morrison's rich prose, the
lucid and poetic densities of her sentences and images. This
textual depth is more than half the fun of all her books, seducing
us with almost musical tones into the dark mysteries of the human
heart in our dark land of black and white."
-Sam Coale, The Providence Journal
"More tone poem than unabashed fiction, [A Mercy is] a
series of emotional episodes revealing an ugly portrait of this
country's earliest days. . . . Through it all is the very human
ability to survive, to endure unimaginable pain. . . . Morrison's
prose makes it impossible to wallow in the story's obvious misery.
. . . Her world [is] a savage realm that retains some beauty thanks
to the author's staggering gifts."
-Christian Toto, The Denver Post
"Breathtaking . . . Beguiling . . . Fast-moving and poignant. . . .
By concentrating on the denizens of one homestead, Morrison is able
to limn the entire disorder of early America. It's one of the
reasons this short novel is so powerful-Morrison's deep and
sympathetic focus on a handful of lives. Each chapter concentrates
on one character, and as the book unfolds, the story is revealed,
slowly, with magisterial grace. The end result is satisfying and
stirring. . . . The strength of A Mercy is Morrison's lucid
eye, her uncanny ability to create character studies that are
memorable and that, through her lapidary approach, tell a tale that
is profound and important. In her hands, character is story.
. . . Like William Faulkner, Toni Morrison has honed a personal
experimental style that pays great attention to rhythm and diction.
Like Faulkner, she is understated and cerebral while creating
gothic grotesqueries in an agrarian setting. A Mercy, for
all its brevity, will be celebrated and discussed along with
Morrison's best work."
-Corey Mesler, Memphis Flyer Online
"Reaching back to 1682 on the Atlantic coast of America, Morrison
describes a dangerous Eden, a simmering, pungent stew of Angolan
slaves, transplanted London guttersnipes, Portuguese plantation
owners, Dutch traders and the pox-ridden remnants of original
peoples. . . . Morrison's lush prose has always had a mesmeric
quality . . . The music and mystery of [her] language is still
abundant."
-Janice P. Nimura, Newsday
"Smooth and alluring . . . There is hardship, injustice and misery
[in A Mercy]. But there is also hope and beauty-and mercy,
in the face of wrenching choices. And there is the poetic vibrance
of Morrison's writing, especially in the voice of the semiliterate
Florens. . . . She lasts, as do the other characters in A
Mercy-they are a window into our past, and also into our
present."
-Lisa McLendon, The Wichita Eagle
"As evocative and haunting as Beloved . . . Morrison
recently told National Public Radio that she sought in this novel
to 'remove race from slavery.' . . . By reminding us that many
white Americans also can trace their ancestry back to people who
were enslaved, Morrison has deepened our understanding of human
history and the complex legacy of slavery in America."
-Emily Seelbinder, The Charlotte Observer
"I loved it. A Mercy is tender, brutal, quiet and urgent,
with a cast of characters that will make you forget you're reading
a novel. . . . If you're looking for a short novel that will, at
the end, make you want to turn around and experience it again, get
A Mercy and sacrifice some time. You won't be sorry."
-Terri Schlichenmeyer, The Philadelphia Tribune
"Like Armstrong hitting the mountain stages, [Toni Morrison] is in
the 'zone.' . . . There are an infinite number of stories in [A
Mercy], with each new character's narrative throwing light onto
unexpected sides of the people we thought we knew. When Morrison
takes us into a world, we do not visit it; we inhabit it. . . . One
of her great skills is her uncanny ear; every voice is unique,
simultaneously sounding like both past and present. . . . Perhaps
the greatest pleasure of the book lies in drawing one in so
completely; there are no places where faulty construction hurls us
back into reality."
-Elinor Teele, California Literary Review
"In 1690, Anglo-Dutch trader Jacob Vaark . . . reluctantly decides
to accept a young slave girl, Florens, as partial compensation [for
a debt]. Taken from her baby brother and her mother, who thinks
that giving up her daughter to a kinder slave owner is an act of
mercy, Florens finds herself in the midst of a community of women
striving to understand their burdens of sorrow and grief and to
discover the mercies of love. Much as she did in Paradise,
Morrison hauntingly weaves the stories of these women into a
colorful tale of loss, despair, hope, and love. . . . Magical,
mystical, and memorable, Morrison's poignant parable of mercies
hidden and revealed belongs in every library."
-Henry L. Carrigan, Library Journal (starred)
"Nobel laureate Morrison returns more explicitly to the net of pain
cast by slavery, a theme she detailed so memorably in
Beloved. Set at the close of the 17th century, [A
Mercy] details America's untoward foundation: dominion over
Native Americans, indentured workers, women and slaves. A slave at
a plantation in Maryland offers up her daughter, Florens, to a
relatively humane Northern farmer, Jacob, as debt payment from
their owner. The ripples of this choice spread to the inhabitants
of Jacob's farm, populated by women with intersecting and
conflicting desires. . . . Morrison's lyricism infuses the shifting
voices of her characters as they describe a brutal society being
forged in the wilderness. Morrison's unflinching narrative is all
the more powerful for its relative brevity; it takes hold of the
reader and doesn't let go until the wrenching final-page
crescendo."
-Publishers Weekly (starred)
"Brilliant . . . Riveting, even poetic. . . . The time is the late
1600s, when what will become the U.S. remains a chain of colonies
along the Atlantic coast. Not only does slavery still exist, it is
a thriving industry that translates into plenty of business for
lots of people. . . . [Morrison] has shown a partiality for the
'chorus' method of storytelling, wherein a group of individuals who
are involved in a single event or incident tell their versions of
what happened, the individual voices maintaining their
distinctiveness while their personal tales overlap each other with
a layering effect that gives Morrison's prose its resonance and
deep sheen of enameling. Here the voices belong to the women
associated with Virginia planter Jacob Vaark . . . these women
include the long-suffering Rebekka, his wife; Lina and Sorrow,
slave women with unique perspectives on the events taking place on
Vaark's plantation; and Florens, a slave girl whom Vaark accepts as
partial payment on a debt and whose separation from her mother is
the pivotal event around which Morrison weaves her short but deeply
involving story. A fitting companion to her highly regarded
Beloved."
-Brad Hooper, Booklist (starred)
"Abandonment, betrayal and loss are the themes of this latest
exploration of America's morally compromised history from Morrison.
All of the characters she sets down in the colonial landscape circa
1690 are bereft, none more evidently so than Florens, 16-year-old
slave of Jacob Vaark and his wife Rebekka. . . . Jacob reluctantly
took Florens in settlement of a debt from a Maryland landowner. Her
own mother offered her-so as not to be traded with Florens' infant
brother, the girl thinks. (The searing final monologue reveals it
was not so simple.) Florens joined a household of misfits somewhere
in the North. Jacob was a poor orphan who came to America to make a
new start; Rebekka's parents essentially sold her to him to spare
themselves her upkeep. . . . They take in others similarly
devastated. Lina, raped by a 'Europe,' has been cast out by her
Native American tribe. Mixed-race Sorrow survived a shipwreck only
to be made pregnant by her rescuer . . . Willard and Scully are
indentured servants, farmed out to Jacob by their contract holders,
who keep fraudulently extending their time. . . . America was
founded on the involuntary servitude of blacks and whites, [and]
the colonies are rife with people who belong nowhere else and
anxiously strive to find something to hold onto in the New World.
[With] gorgeous language and a powerful understanding of the
darkest regions of the human heart . . . this allusive, elusive
little gem adds its own luster to the Nobel Laureate's shimmering
body of work."
-Kirkus Reviews
"An intimate, insightful, and surprisingly relevant look at the
ties that bind us in relationships."
-Good Housekeeping
"Morrison's storytelling genius is fully blooming in A
Mercy, told from the viewpoints of a number of characters, the
most significant being Florens, a young black slave. . . . Morrison
creates a magical voice for Florens that lifts readers up on a
swirling arc of prose, which makes all [her] despair and heartbreak
almost tolerable. Florens could be describing how Morrison
captivates her readers when she says 'I can never not have you have
me.'"
-Vick Mickunas, Dayton Daily News
"The fact that readers will be astonished by what they discover [in
17th-century Virginia] is a testament to how different that world
was from our own, and also to the author's uncanny gift for
inhabiting the nuances of place, character and situation. . . .
Morrison weaves a rich tangle of human stories and interactions . .
. [She has created] a world filled with wonder that we have to
piece together for ourselves, out of the characters' wildly
divergent partial impressions and imperfect understandings. By
requiring this act of imagination from her readers, Morrison
enriches the experience and brings it closer in, sometimes so close
it seems to jump off the page."
-Peter Magnani, San Jose Mercury News
"[Morrison] negotiates the twisted intersection of race, class and
gender in America better and more fully than any writer has ever
done. A Mercy, continues this journey, following the tangled
threads of our history all the way back to the beginning, when the
very idea of America was still struggling to be born. The result is
Morrison's best novel since Beloved. . . . Using her
trademark kaleidoscopic approach, Morrison allows [her] characters
to unspool their unique stories [which] succeed in depicting
complicated, conflicted beings. . . . The overarching lesson of
A Mercy is that history is not foreordained. In an ending
that both echoes and diverges from the infanticide hanging over
Beloved, we watch another mother make a very different and
more hopeful choice regarding her daughter's fate. In its repeated
insistence that such choice is possible, A Mercy not only
transcends a monolithic and static view of slavery, racism and the
American past. It also pays homage to our collective power to
imagine a better future."
-Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
"Achingly beautiful . . . A Mercy reads like poetry, with
vivid descriptions and emotional dialogue. . . . It is full of
sorrow, sacrifice and pain. But it ends with a ray of light, a
description of the ultimate mercy."
-Laura L. Hutchinson, Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star
"Morrison is a woman whose stories find transcendence in even the
darkest periods of history. Her latest novel, A Mercy, casts
an unflinching eye on slave trade in the 17th century. It's
heartbreaking, luminous, and a solemn reminder of our nation's
history."
-Redbook
"A Mercy takes on slavery in its infancy and reveals what
lies beneath the surface. It's an ambivalent and disturbing story,
sparingly written, including rejection, abandonment and acts of
mercy with unforeseen consequences."
-Ebony
"Morrison is as good as her many awards say. . . . Her use of
language . . . makes you feel the emotion of the characters,
demanding understanding and sympathy, not letting you avoid it with
the explanation 'it's only a story.' A Mercy is an
outstanding addition to Morrison's list, probably destined for the
next 'best work of American fiction poll' in 2020."
-Sacramento Book Review
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