Morrison doesn’t rest on her laurels
“A Mercy” by Toni Morrison
(Alfred A. Knopf, 176 pages, $23.95)
Old Nobel literature laureates die and sometimes fade away, but first they typically keep publishing amid an odd atmosphere that combines imperial hauteur and cloying deference.
What a pleasure, then, to watch 77-year-old Toni Morrison (“Beloved”), the last literary Nobelist (1993) from the U.S., bound into literature with her new book as if it were the first time, with the spry energy of a doe.
“A Mercy,” her ninth novel and first in five years, is that beguiling and beautiful, that deftly condensed, that sinewy with imaginative sentences, lyric flight and abundant human sensitivity.
The novel, whose title becomes clear only on the book’s wrenching last page, unfolds through multiple perspectives.
In what seems to be Virginia circa 1690 – Morrison is elusive enough that early reviewers have alternately placed the main setting in New York and Maryland – a farmer and trader named Jacob Vaark brings a slave girl, Florens, 7 or 8 years old, back to his homestead as partial payment for a debt from the decadent owner of a Maryland tobacco plantation.
Jacob is happily married to Rebekka, a wife bartered to him at age 16 by her English parents. The rest of his makeshift extended farm family are also business acquisitions of a sort, though Jacob sympathizes with “orphans and strays,” having been one of the former himself.
Sorrow, the troubled 11-year-old survivor of a shipwreck, was impregnated by a rescuer/rapist and traded to Jacob for lumber. Lina, an American Indian teenager, was sold at 14 to Jacob by the Presbyterians who raised her after plague destroyed her village. She becomes Rebekka’s chief helper, almost a friend despite their status gap.
Rounding out the farm menagerie are Scully and Willard, indentured white servants, and an unnamed blacksmith, a free black man who excites Florens as he works on a new grand house for Jacob.
Having seen the blacksmith’s ability to cure smallpox symptoms with folk remedies, Rebekka, when she falls ill with fever herself, sends Florens to find him, driving the action around which the climax of the novel turns.
Morrison invests more in character here than in historical critique, eager to explore the thoughts of almost every person on Jacob’s farm.
Along the way come moments whose artistry freezes one’s page-turning. Morrison’s tactile reports rivet: the “alehouse lights” like “gemstones fighting darkness,” the graphic depictions of steerage.
Voices shift from Florens’ adrenaline-filled ardor (“I think if you wake and see me seeing you I will die”) to Lina’s calm assessment of all whites as “Europes,” to the narrator’s aphoristic deeming of “patience” as “the lifeblood of farming.”
Morrison wears her knowledge lightly, yet every page exhibits her control of the period’s objects and artifacts, its worries and necessities, challenges and dangers.
Morrison once quipped, after winning her Nobel, that it had given her a “license to strut.” But a book as masterfully wrought as “A Mercy” behooves its author to swagger.
Go to it, Ms. Morrison.