A Mercy

Toni Morrison

Alfred A. Knopf/Random House

2008

Everyone in the universe (even some of you) has already reviewed Toni Morrison’s newest, A Mercy. I figure that there isn’t a lot I can add to the discussion.

So I’ll just give some brief impressions.

The good:

  1. It’s totally short! Only 167 pages.
  2. It’s Toni Morrison. Like Isabel Allende, her writing is so beautiful that you can sing her words (seriously, try it).
  3. Once again, Morrison chooses an underexplored era to tell a story about how similar people are despite our superficial differences, and how people are so resilient that we can cobble together what are effectively operative family units even after being fragmented by the most devastating traumas.
  4. I keep thinking about this book in the context of the U.S. presidential election. This is truly the story of how some of America’s greatest birth defects (TM Condoleezza Rice) — racism, sexism, classism, etc. — came to be.
  5. A Mercy is much, much better than the piping hot mess that was Love or the annoyance that was Paradise.

More after the jump.

The bad:

  1. The character Florens kept putting me in mind of both Sethe and Beloved from Beloved. Morrison sure does love her mothers and daughters with strained or nonexistent or troubled relationships.
  2. That sing-songy writing — especially when it comes to dialogue and the way we know people spoke in the 17th century — is actually utterly inauthentic.
  3. Also, the stream-of-consciousness stuff? It’s not a crutch or easily caricaturable (is that even a word?) characteristic of Morrison’s writing yet, but it could yet get there.
  4. I don’t really like these characters. I’m empathetic to their circumstances, but I connect emotionally more with what they are than who they are. Of course, that’s fine because I don’t think I’m meant to like them, but I’m just putting it out there.
  5. It should go without saying that A Mercy is no Beloved, but A Mercy also is no Jazz.