“Joan Silber’s sweeping yet intimate novel traces the delicate patterns by which others, often from afar and unknowingly, may determine our innermost longings and even our fate. Mercy is a profound, gorgeously written reflection on identity, friendship, and love. A book that keeps echoing long after turning the last page.”
--Hernan Diaz, author of Trust, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“The universe of Joan Silber’s superb new novel is vast yet particular: it holds its inhabitants accountable for their actions, forgiving them, shaking them, binding their destinies through the power of story. What do the vanished owe to the visible? What do the living owe the dead? As Mercy tackles these powerful questions, it reveals itself to be a true masterpiece.”
--Carolyn Ferrell, author of Dear Miss Metropolitang
Silber—the great chronicler of the webs of love and coincidence that connect people—turns her attention to drugs and sex and mercy.
Again here, in her 10th work of fiction, Silber uses her signature form—interconnected stories with a rotating point-of-view—to bound through time and around the globe. The central characters are two pairs of friends, connected by a tiny moment in the emergency room of St. Vincent’s, a long-gone hospital in Greenwich Village. Ivan and Eddie were inseparable in their 1970s glory days, but part of their connection was that they were drug buddies, and this leads to Ivan making a mistake for which he can never forgive himself. Also involved was Eddie’s girlfriend Ginger, whose later glamorous trajectory projects her image into their lives for decades. The second pair is Cara and Nini, whose chapters glitter with Silberian wisdom about relationships. When Cara looks back on her wild early romantic history, she notes that “lust was a big deal in the world around [her]; people believed in sex in a way that they don’t quite anymore.” Simlarly, anthropology grad student and serial monogamist Nini can’t help but wonder, “How did anyone get anything done with love in the world?” This actually becomes her field of specialization, love and courtship in a group called the Mien based in Thailand and China. The question of whether Ivan and Eddie will reconnect hangs over the book, even as the meaning and limits of mercy are explored. It can be anything from finding you have accidentally stumbled on your guesthouse in Amsterdam after wandering the city’s streets in a stupor, to the grace offered by morphine and opium to the gravely injured, to an insight gleaned during a 12-step meeting: “I’d listened to people overwhelmed by the relief of confessing, blessed by the mercy of untold secrets told.” So…does that mean they reconnect or not? What a sophisticated trick, to create this particular form of suspense and intellectual pleasure.
Like a favorite special in a beloved restaurant, Silber again serves her unique flavor of reading joy.--Kirkus Reviews“
A story of love, tragedy, of paths diverging and intertwining, Mercy is human and moving, awful and beautiful.”--LitHub
Photo by Shari Diamond