Like many Americans, I was first introduced to the work of Toni
Morrison during my freshman year of college, when I read THE BLUEST
EYE as part of a literature survey course. I moved on to several
more of her books --- BELOVED, SONG OF SOLOMON, TAR BABY --- in
English and women's studies courses, and have read all her other
novels published since, continuing to marvel at her penetrating
insights into race, sex and American history. THE BLUEST EYE, her
debut, continues to be the one most often taught in college,
probably because it's her shortest and most accessible. That is,
until now.

Morrison's new book, A MERCY, is perhaps the perfect
introduction to this Nobel Prize-winning author's work, offering
readers, in fewer than 175 pages, a glimpse into her powerful
literary style and keen insights into issues of race, violence,
sex, history, identity and community that also demonstrates her
brilliance and maturity as a writer.

The America that Morrison shows readers in A MERCY is one in its
infancy, one in which "states" were hardly united, when differences
of background, religion and ideology marked provincial boundaries
as stark as any political border. Set in the 1680s and 1690s, it
portrays a region in search of an identity, one in which the
definitions of "free" and "slave" are both nebulous and
shifting.

At the center of the novel is the household of Jacob Vaark.
Vaark, like almost everyone in the colony, is an immigrant, a
businessman who lives somewhere in the North but enters into
slaveholding --- and the social grasping that seems to accompany it
--- almost by accident. He obtains his first slave --- a Native
American woman named Lina, whose village has been destroyed by
smallpox and whose reputation has been destroyed after a rape ---
to be company for his mail-order wife, Rebekka. Eventually, the two
women, who develop a close friendship, are joined by another,
deeply troubled slave known only as Sorrow.

Finally, the object of the "mercy" of the novel's title is
Florens, bought for the Vaark household as a young girl at the
entreaty of her mother. As Vaark travels on business and, later, as
he becomes obsessed with building a grand home, the women form a
family of sorts. After Vaark's death and Rebekka's subsequent
illness, however, they discover just how fragile their bonds are,
how fragmented their identities.

Vaark's household is something of a microcosm of the nascent
country. Besides demonstrating the splintered identities of various
American ethnic groups (and even of some individuals), the stories
that make up the novel illustrate starkly and powerfully the legacy
of violence, betrayal and inhumanity that is part of our nation's
heritage. In particular, Morrison illustrates starkly and
powerfully the ways in which slavery, in all its forms, robs people
of their essential humanity and promotes the kind of "wilderness"
that leads to violence, shame and despair.

Readers will come away from A MERCY feeling that they understand
not only Morrison's literary techniques but also a little more
about American history, marveling that out of these fragmented,
isolated, brutal pieces came anything resembling unity.