A Mercy is Nobel Prize-winning American writer Toni Morrison’s ninth novel, published in 2008. It is set in the late 17th century in colonial Virginia and explores the intersections of race, gender, and class in a lawless, raw new world.
When asked in an interview with NPR about her interest in this early era of American history, Morrison explained, “because it was—I guess pre-racial is good enough. It certainly was pre-racist. When slavery had not yet been coupled with race, when most of the world were slaves, and they may have been called serfs or peons or peasants or what have you, but empires rested on the labor of people in bondage. And that was not the exotic part of the origins of this country, but it became an unusual relationship when certain things happened, and the aristocrats and the landed gentry needed to protect themselves from the poor, which in this case were itinerants, and they were indentured servants from Europe, and they were enslaved Africans and enslaved native Americans. So, the solution in one instance in Virginia, which took root elsewhere, was to say that it's the invention of white people, really…”
A Mercy was a bestseller and one of the New York Times’ best books of 2008. Critics generally lauded the work. The New Yorker reviewer concluded, “Varied and authoritative and frequently beautiful though the language is, it circles around a vision, both turgid and static, of a new world turning old, and poisoned from the start.” The Houston Chroncile raved, “A Mercy captures the same crazy magic of Song of Solomon and Beloved, Morrison’s most haunting, lyrical books. One doesn’t read them so much as go digging for truths past tight and buried deep in Morrison’s words. In part, it is the sheer mental work–the close reading, the flipping back and forth between passages–that makes her novels so satisfying. By the end, one feels as if one has cracked a code. Or seen the light.” And Kirkus Reviews noted, with slightly more critique, “Better seen as a lengthy prose poem than a novel, this allusive, elusive little gem adds its own shadowy luster to the Nobel laureate’s shimmering body of work.”
