A Mercy?

So, what better way to start a new blog than with a book review. A couple of weeks ago I read Toni Morrison's newest book A Mercy, and before I launch into why I was underwhelmed by her most recent volume, I think it only fair that I discuss a few of my motivations and biases. I think Toni Morrison is amazing. In my list of favorite writers (and with my English major-y inclinations, the aforementioned list is very long and varied) she ranks very near the top. I love her writing, the bit of it I have sampled, because of the emotional veracity of it. I'm a very intuitive and emotive reader; I get caught up in the characters and their feelings and motivations, and the way that her characters' internal humanity is relayed through her language is to me where the beauty of her writing lies and where her tales become literature. Toni Morrison is one of the best at making the emotions of her characters literally jump off the page, and after making one's way through the devastating nature of Sethe's guilt and sorrow in Beloved, or through the despair and confusion of Sula, one begins to expect a certain amount of poignancy and sustained affective energy when coming in contact with a Morrison tale. In A Mercy the gripping, page turning, emotional power of the characters was missing. I could sense Morrison grasping for it, and at times she manages to hit these emotional heights with the storyline concerning Florens' love for the blacksmith and with the back story of Florens' abandonment by her mother, but there is no consistency. And for A Mercy to be in the same realm as some of Morrison's earlier novels there must needs be a continuous tension bubbling just beneath the surface, specifically in novel written with so many disparate narrative voices. A Mercy is written somehat like Beloved in that each character is given a section of the book where the reader is allowed to confront the overall action and storyline through the point of view of each character. Each character has their own memories and motivations and flashsbacks, and through each character telling their part of the story the reader is a given a fuller version of events. Each mini-narrative is like a piece of a puzzle that when put together form the entire story, but there needs to be something- some sort of glue that binds the pieces together. In Beloved, the character of Beloved and all the years of sorrow and guilt and pain weaves itself through the lives, past and present, of each character. For A Mercy, there was nothing that strong holding all the pieces together. It was just a coming of age story about a bunch of women, told by these same women and occasionally by the dude that brought all these different women together. I think Morrison maybe aspired to some more subtle point with this book than in the past, and I am fully aware that maybe I just missed this more subtle point, but somehow I doubt it. Poignancy no matter how subtle, is still both effective and affective, and this book is missing the affective presence that Morrison is known for and the effective cohesion to bring whatever it's point is home to the reader.

So Final Verdict: Read A Mercy, if, like me, you are curious about where Toni Morrison stands in her craft at the current moment. It has been five years since her last work of fiction, so if you are fan of hers, go for it. If you are new to her work, start with Beloved... even if the ghost doesnt work for you, its an emotional juggernaut of a book and its worth your time even if you don't want to get into the sort of paranormal stuff that goes on in the story.

Next up: Jazz. In one of my AAAS classes one of my profs said that Jazz was Morrison's best book. I'm gonna see about that... Right now I think Beloved is her best.. I mean it did win a Pulitzer.