The divided states of America

A Mercy, by Toni Morrison

You may or may not agree with the New York Times, which a couple of years ago voted Toni Morrison’s Beloved the greatest work of American fiction of the past quarter century. (What about Updike’s Rabbit novels, you might ask? Or Philip Roth’s American Pastoral? Or Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping? Or, or, or …). And you may or not agree with the Swedish Academy’s citation, when Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, praising her ‘visionary force’. You may have struggled with the increasingly poetic and mystic drift of her recent novels, Jazz (1992) and Love (2003). But there is no denying that Toni Morrison is a writer to be reckoned with.

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Her new novel presents familiar challenges. A Mercy is set in 17th-century America. We know this because, on the second page, a character announces that ‘Florens, she says, it’s 1690.’