A Mercy by Toni Morrison (2008)

In late 17th Century America a racially diverse group of strangers form a family as the father, Jacob Vaark, builds a great house for them.

Book Review: A Mercy is a powerful addition to the American canon, perfect in its own way as a tale of expulsion from the Garden of Eden. How Edenic early America was destroyed by its twin original sins. This is a large story hidden in a small book. We have two streams in A Mercy: what the author has to say and how she says it. Toni Morrison (1931-2019) tells this story of colonial America (pre-United States) through the ephemeral and shifting feelings, senses, images, emotions, thoughts, memories, impressions, and imaginings of her characters. Stream of consciousness combined with heavy research. The point of view changes frequently and is disorienting at times, but I think Morrison has reached the point where she can expect a little work from her readers. There are bad writers and bad readers; Morrison is not a bad writer. Any reader who won't put in the effort to capture this story is a bad reader. That's okay, there're worse things in the world. Considering that Morrison's novels are historical fiction, much of her writing was immersing herself in some aspect of the American past, researching the American narrative and its connection to, inter alia, race, which is why her novels are now so necessarily part of the American literary heritage. Here in the U.S. before it was, she posits a chance that America could have been the Garden of Eden it was meant to be, that it might not be brought down by its twin original sins, the twin serpents that poisoned that garden. The garden is failed father Jacob Vaark's great house (in the town of Milton), with its two wrought iron serpents at the gate. He had gathered together four women from all over the world: Africa (Florens), England (Rebekka), the original America (Lina), and one a mix of any or all of the above (Sorrow). They form a kind of family, which just might transcend the societal flaws that brought them all together. But Vaark is no more perfect than Adam, and the family "falls" apart. "They once thought they were a kind of family because together they had carved companionship out of isolation ... their futures were separate ... courage alone would not be enough." Morrison sees a couple of other cracks in the foundation of America. The novel's heavy emphasis on religion shows flaws in faith that also propelled America's schisms. It's easy to forget that a desire for freedom to worship as they wished drove many of the early colonies. Capitalism also comes in for a critique here: The trade in rum mandates slavery, and no trade can quite escape the taint of buying and selling human beings. Even a good-hearted man like Jacob Vaark ("there was a profound difference between the intimacy of slave bodies at Jublio and a remote labor force in Barbados. Right? Right, he thought."). Morrison wrote an epic in 167 pages. A Mercy is the story of the Fall of America, a paradise lost, but still with that tiny bit of hope that mercy provides: "It was not a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human."  [4½★]