A Review of Toni Morrison’s A MERCY

By Kyle Thomas Smith

This is my review of Toni Morrison’s new book A Mercy.

It will appear this week in Edge Magazine.

In 1990, three years before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison said in an interview with Bill Moyers: “I rewrite and rewrite to make the books look like they were written in a matter of hours.”

That’s one of the things I love most about Morrison whom I hail as one of the world’s greatest living authors. In interviews, she might appear to be all intellect, but her greatest works—Sula, Song of Solomon, Jazz, Beloved—are marked by simple, immediate prose that builds up to a burning tower of mythology, violence, calamity, deprivation and her characters’ tempestuous wills to survive. Over the course of her 38 years as a novelist, Toni Morrison has singlehandedly established a universe in which the black experience stands with one foot on the skids of America and the other in the anarchy of an ancient Greek tragedy. When I am hungry for inspiration, I often devour the fierce, possessive passages in Morrison’s books and find my imagination sated while my body quivers from aftershock.

Unfortunately, I did not experience such rapture upon reading her hotly anticipated new novel, A Mercy. When I first picked up the slim 169-page book, I rustled my backside into the couch, preparing for the ride of my life, but soon found myself turning over for a nap. Although lush and erudite, the narration runs like molasses. Pulling my attention back to the storyline was like wrestling the Good Year Blimp back to the ground with a lasso. Thinking that I might just have been having an off day, I gave the book another try the next day…and the next…and the next…and the following week. For the first time in my experience of Morrison, my attention consistently drifted away from the page and into the stratosphere. Oh, how I yearned for the reprieve of her past perfection! Alas, it did not come. No doubt Morrison deserves an A+ for effort and concept on A Mercy, but it’d take round after round of rewrites to give this book the momentum of her masterworks.

Like her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved, Morrison’s A Mercy tackles the subject of American slavery. Where Beloved studied the catastrophic effects of slavery in the years before and after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, A Mercy is set in the 17th Century when slavery first took root in the Dutch, Scandinavian and English colonies on America’s eastern seaboard. In an August 2008 interview, Morrison told New York magazine that she “wanted to get to a place before slavery was equated with race. Whether [slaves] were black or white was less important than what [slave-masters] owned and what their power was.” Where Morrison’s prior works explored societies of people marginalized on account of their race, A Mercy is more of a historical tale meant to underscore Morrison’s scholarly contention that “there is no civilization that did not rest on unpaid labor—not Athens, not Russia, not England, no one.”

Yet the novel’s young slave Florens subsists under conditions that are idyllic compared to the unrelenting treachery in Seth’s life in Beloved. The book begins with Jacob Vaark, a Dutch trader, travelling on horseback through the wilds of Virginia to Maryland to settle a debt that a Portuguese landowner, Senhor D’Ortega, is incapable of paying. Vaark compromises by accepting D’Ortega’s offer to give him one of his slaves. A slave named minha mae begs Vaark to choose her own nine-year-old daughter Florens. Vaark and D’Ortega agree to the arrangement while Florens crumbles inside at her mother’s betrayal. However, Vaark turns out to be a kind, compassionate master who owns acres of forested land in a Dutch-inhabited colony. He has two indentured servants and a Native American worker named Lina, who gloms on to Florens, conferring on her the love she had for the tribe she lost to a smallpox epidemic. Morrison creates a setting where black, white and red seem to all be treated the same.

But when Jacob Vaark dies, his wife Rebekka goes mad with grief. Rebekka had escaped religious persecution in England and hoped to find happiness by marrying Vaark in the New World. Only, disease was so rampant and conditions were so untested that Rebekka ended up losing child after child on its soil. Vaark’s death proves enough to set Rebekka over the edge. She begins to lose faith in a personal God and exacts the role of plantation termagant: “The pleasure of upbraiding an incompetent servant outweighed any satisfaction of a chore well done and the housewife raged happily at every unswept corner, poorly made fire, imperfectly scrubbed pot, carelessly weeded garden row and badly plucked bird.” Moreover, the novel comes equipped with Sorrow, an orphan servant girl who is the repository for all the foreboding that brews in the back of all minds on the Vaark estate. Like Little Father Time in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Sorrow is the embodiment of a doom foretold in the days after Vaark’s death and in the formation of a nation where slavery will soon flourish in the uttermost cruelty. Yet having known life when Vaark, whom Florens refers to as Sir, was still alive, Florens comes to discover that her mother’s abandonment was, in fact, a mercy.

In A Mercy, Morrison tells the stories of more than half a dozen major characters from their own individual points of view. Yet, right up to the last page of the novel, the characters remain surprisingly underdeveloped. Where Morrison once packed her books with allegories that gave ample context to her characters and their strife, A Mercy has a prosaic monotony where precious little folklore and witchcraft lurk. Refreshing as it is that Morrison has presented an historical milieu in which different races coexist without racism—notably, at a time when so many Americans are eagerly waiting to elect Barack Obama—the narrative lacks the poignancy and piquancy that has put her on the pantheon of modern literature. Never did I expect that I would end up writing such criticisms of the beloved Toni Morrison. But what kind of reviewer would I be if I showed A Mercy too much mercy?

Tags: A MERCY, Barack Obama, racism, slavery, Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison's A Mercy