A Mercy / Toni Morrison

As one of the the United States' most repected living writers, Toni Morrison's books are always highly anticipated. Her newest weighs in at a very slim 167 pages and visits some familiar territory (slavery, motherhood, love lost, broken families, gender relations), but her elegant, lyrical prose continues to amaze.

This novel is set in the late 1600's on a farm in what will become the United States. The characters take turns telling their story in the first person, a bit reminiscent of a Greek chorus. They are all caught up in the web of slavery as is the entire nascent culture in which they live. The farm owner, Jacob Vaark, owns two slaves, one black, one Native American, uses the services of two white indentured servants, and also has one other young foundling of indeterminate race with servant status in the household. Through these characters, Morrison explores the full range of forced servitude in an era before slavery was limited to people of African heritage.

Vaark is a so-called benevolent slaveowner, who likes to feel that he is above the flesh-trade. Vaark and his wife Rebekka have lost all of their children to accident or disease, and so treat their subordinates as quasi-family, having none of their own. They work side-by-side and strive together to keep the farm running in a difficult natural environment.The group lives, if not in happiness, at least in peace until Vaark falls ill with smallpox and dies. Then the little world they've carved out for themselves in the wilderness quickly crumbles. Without the master of the house, neither wife nor slave nor servant has any status in the outside world. Perhaps more troubling, they no longer have the security of hanging together as a unit. Each is an orphan in a dangerous world, and the mechanisms of bondage have stripped their ability to connect to each other on the most basic of human levels.

Morrison uses language in a really beautiful way in this novel. Each character has a distinct voice and way of relating to the world around her. The author does not feel the need to fully explain everything that happens in the book -- some things she leaves to the reader to figure out, others she explains later through the voices of other characters. The plot is slight, but the characters are complex and their relationships to each other and to the world are even more complicated. Underpinning all of this is the knowledge that Morrison is describing the very beginnings of our American culture. This is the kind of book that stays with you long after you've finished reading.