Reviewed by Shannon Glass
In her latest novel, Mercy, Joan Silber gives a multigenerational perspective on the ripples that radiate from one person’s gravest regret. In distinct, hauntingly clear internal monologues, Silber illustrates the many ways that people can show mercy to others and, most importantly, themselves. Each character’s romantic, platonic, and familial relationships take center stage in complicated ways while they resolve the same question: Is mercy for the broken or the breaker?
The book is structured in six loosely connected parts, each narrated by a different first-person character. What could have been homogeneous and discrete stories in the hands of a less capable writer blooms instead into six individual lives glancing off one another. Mercy threads through the book like a golden thread stitching closed an open wound. Silber centers the complicated ways people relate to one another, their pasts, and what awaits in their futures, also exploring how gender roles complicate these relationships. Because it is rendered realistically, the internal conflict these characters face is at once unique and relatable.
To some of the narrators, mercy is forgiveness for a past wrong that can no longer be remedied. In the first part, told by Ivan, Silber sets up the inciting incident for all the stories that follow. In the 1970s, Ivan abandons his best friend, Eddie, who is dying of a heroin overdose in an emergency room, to save himself from the legal consequences of also being high. For years, this decision haunts Ivan’s actions, guilt forcing him to seek mercy via the oblivion of substance abuse. For the unforgivable and the irreparable, mercy takes the form of avoidance and repression, at least for a time. Ivan pulls his life together and eventually must forgive himself for what he did (and did not do) that night with Eddie. In Ivan’s reckoning with his past and salvaging his future, Silber creates an embodied journey of self-forgiveness, making his story deeply universal.
Silber contrasts this with Cara’s character, who was ten years old and present in the emergency room the night Ivan leaves Eddie there. She internalizes the memory of that abandonment as an innate understanding that people will always leave you. As an adult, she forgives too late when she grieves for an old boyfriend she learns has died, though she hasn’t seen him since they were teenagers and he abandoned her after an ill-fated road trip. Death as a mercy is another common theme throughout the book. Death is the final opportunity for a reckoning—the last chance to address an argument. In this case, Cara offers her ex the only mercy left: complete and total forgiveness. This makes Cara a counterpoint to Ivan: he is the leaver, and she is continually left. The impact of understanding that everyone will leave gives Cara’s character a firmer footing, the moral high ground, from which to grant mercy to the imperfect people around her.
Through Cara’s chapters, along with those of Astrid—Eddie’s girlfriend at the time of the overdose— and Cara’s daughter Isabel, Silber also examines mercy through the lens of gender. Opening with Ivan’s story, where a man’s own actions have caused his misery, Silber moves on to female narrators who offer mercy to the destructive men in their lives. Cara forgives even her absent father when he sends for her from Bali, where he lives at the end of his life. Isabel doesn’t understand her mother’s willingness to make such an effort and spend so much money for a man who abandoned his daughter as a child. The subtext of feminism rings clearest between the mother and daughter, who are separated by a generation of experience. One exchange about their potential trip to Bali reveals their different feelings and suggests the shifts between 1970s feminist views and those of the 2000s:
“His invitation was, ‘Come if you can, and make an old man happy.’ Hadn’t we already humored enough men in our life?
‘Oh, please,’ my mother said. ‘Like it’s any kind of work.’”
Where Cara sees only a request that she can answer, Isabel sees a manipulation by a man to get what he wants without having to apologize for his bad behavior in order to get it.
Silber’s characters are given the room and depth to spin their life stories over decades, which seamlessly allows them to make mistakes, form regrets, and reflect on them years later. Each narrator adds depth or casts doubt on a previous one, tangling emotional storylines in a way that feels like truth and creating problems when one character’s actions go against another’s desires. One character remembers an argument and feels guilt and regret for the incident—the other one involved doesn’t mention it. For example, Ivan resents Astrid because she takes up Eddie’s time once they begin dating, but Astrid’s story isn’t affected by these negative feelings, if she is aware of them at all. These slights are expertly crafted in the memories and narrative summaries Silber uses throughout the book. By using internal monologue so heavily, the idea of mercy becomes internalized—mercy is not divine, it is mine. Ivan’s resentment and self-forgiveness both must come from within. That resentment and mercy are within our control uplifts the narrative, despite the desperation of the characters’ stories.
A masterwork of how people complicate their own lives, and how they can grant or withhold mercy—with others and themselves—Mercy is the literary answer to the question of why the difficulty of building and maintaining relationships is a worthwhile venture. Silber shows that mercy is the space between love and death—a place that everyone can choose to live, if they are lucky, for a time.
Shannon Glass holds an MFA from the University of California Riverside Palm Desert program and is the author of the book recommendation blog thefictionpharmacist.com. She lives in Durham, North Carolina with her husband and their merry band of rescue cats.