You’d never call A Mercy a funny book, but Morrison, in her structural brilliance, weaves in some ravishingly witty flourishes.) The voices of these women are radically distinct: the frozen third-person of Lina, a Lenape woman raised by European colonists and sold to Vaark as a young teenager the feverish first-person of Florens, a Black girl on the cusp of womanhood, who directs her narration at a mysterious subject whose identity gradually becomes clear the self-denial of Rebekka, Vaark’s wife, ordered via advertisement and delivered by ship. (One of the book’s most striking moments-the brief appearance of a secondary character accused, by her histrionic religious community, of being a demon-riffs slyly on another meaning of the term. Through them, in turn, it is a novel about what it means to be possessed. This is a novel about the women in Vaark’s possession-three of them enslaved, and one his wife. We study the portrait of Jacob Vaark, at first, an Anglo-Dutch trader in the American colonies in the late seventeenth century, but he’s just the grit at the center of the pearl. The second read is a wholly new experience-almost another book entirely.) (That’s why I went right back to the beginning again: Like much of Morrison’s work, A Mercy begins in a place of almost jarring opacity, but the revelations build and build until, at the end, you reach something that feels like truth. A Mercy is a novel of portraits: The chapters skip from character to character, delivering action by way of recollection, slowly sketching in the substance of secrets. “What’s that book about, that you’re reading it again?” asked one of the people I spend time with lately, and it was when I was reaching for a way to answer his question that my mind surfaced this idea of the portrait-gallery assignment. ![]() ![]() It’s a slim novel, fast-moving, and staccato-it’s a lightweight book, not in the sense of flimsy and unprofound, but the way that an aircraft is lightweight: a considered, meticulous construction, optimized for nimbleness, rapidity, flight. I started reading Toni Morrison’s A Mercy for a second time within minutes of finishing my first read. Helen Rosner (ToB 2020) is the New Yorker’s roving food correspondent.
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