Older Writers Revisiting Their Younger Selves

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But for all his faults, the Roth of Indignation is interested in subjects outside himself: war, politics, history, death, things that impinge on the warm bubble of self and family. Whereas Portnoy tells his story from a psychiatrist's couch, Marcus narrates Indignation from beyond the grave (or possibly from a morphine coma). He has been drafted into the Korean War--a draft for which Portnoy was a year too young--and he has fallen on the battlefield. You could read this as Roth's quasi-Oedipal execution of his younger alter ego, but it plays more like a correction: Wake up, Portnoy, there's a harsh world out there, and it doesn't care whether your mother loves you or not. Marcus has learned, in a way that Portnoy never had to, that his parents were right: The world will devour you if you're not careful. And sometimes even if you are.

Before the Fall

Morrison's vision has never been much in need of this kind of enlarging. Her work has always been epic in scope. In Beloved, Morrison told the story of Sethe, a woman who murdered her own child rather than see her sold into slavery. Early on in A Mercy, we watch a mother do the opposite--she puts her daughter Florens up for sale: "Please, Senhor. Not me. Take her. Take my daughter." It's a less bloody moment, but in its way it's no less chilling. A Mercy is that daughter's tale.

To tell it, Morrison reaches back in time--way back. Beloved was set in 1873, in the chaos of postbellum America. A Mercy is set in 1680, when America was nothing more than a loose amalgamation of Indians, religious zealots and malodorous trappers and traders wandering a continent over which territorial lines had been only lightly and provisionally sketched.

It is a dirty, dangerous time but also a weirdly innocent one. Slavery exists--a humane farmer named Jacob Vaark accepts Florens as payment for a bad debt--but A Mercy is not precisely a novel about slavery. When Florens enters Jacob's household, she finds not a rigid caste system based on race but a fluid, funky multicultural arrangement that includes not only Florens but also Jacob's wife, a Native American maid, two indentured servants and an orphan foundling. Their relationships with one another are flexible, and race is just one of any number of things that define them.

Morrison is mooting the perversely hopeful possibility that slavery could have existed without racism or at least without racism as we know it. She lavishes some of her best writing in years on this pre-Revolutionary world, making it so luminous and complex that her characters are in danger of dissolving in it. A Mercy shows us America in the moment before race madness ruined it--it is a wounded land, but the wound has not yet turned septic.

If in Widows and Indignation Updike and Roth are gently upbraiding their younger selves for their narrowness of vision, for their lack of interest in the world around them, in A Mercy, Morrison is urging her younger self, the tortured soul who fashioned the infernal vision that is Beloved, to look even further--beyond the veil of pain and anger, however righteous, to hope. There was a time before the present misery, Morrison seems to be telling herself. And therefore, maybe, there will be a time after it.