John Updike’s controversial review of Toni Morrison’s latest novel, A Mercy, ends with a complaint about what he seems to see as the negativism of a leftist, feminist, multicultural writer like Morrison:

This author’s early novels were breakthroughs into the experience of black Americans as refracted in the poetic and indignant perceptions of a black woman from Lorain, Ohio; as Morrison moves deeper into a more visionary realism, a betranced pessimism saps her plots of the urgency that hope imparts to human adventures. “A Mercy” begins where it ends, with a white man casually answering a slave mother’s plea, but he dies, and she fades into slavery’s myriads, and the child goes mad with love. Varied and authoritative and frequently beautiful though the language is, it circles around a vision, both turgid and static, of a new world turning old, and poisoned from the start.

In other words, Morrison lacks sufficient faith in America; her imaginative vision is of a country without change or hope to offer the citizen, especially if female or non-white. And, to give Updike his due, he’s not simply upbraiding Morrison for a lack of patriotism, he’s pointing to what he identifies as an aesthetic flaw in her work: her pessimism paralyzes her characters and makes her situations pointless because, without hope, why should they or we care what happens to them since we know it will not be good?

On the one hand, Updike has a point. A Mercy is more or less a portrait gallery: six characters are frozen at a moment of crisis—the landed white Jacob at the moment when he purchases the young black girl Florens from a decadent Portugese grandee; Jacob’s wife, Rebekka, after his death from a pox when she too is stricken with the disease and lay between life and death; Lina, her Indian servant, when the responsibility for dealing with the crisis of Rebekka’s illness falls to her; Sorrow, the “family’s” third servant girl, on the point of giving birth to her second child after Lina killed the first one because of Sorrow’s apparent mental instability and promiscuity; Scully, an indentured servant, when he works with his fellow servant and male lover Willard for Rebekka after her recovery from the pox; and Florens’s mother, at the moment when she decides to sell her daughter to Jacob. Morrison gives us, in mostly third-person narration, what led the characters to their moments of crisis and she limns their individual temperaments and worldviews.

The writing is often vivid and memorable: Jacob’s noble disgust at the decaying Catholic aristo, Rebekka’s fevered recollections of travelling over the Atlantic in the company of other transported Englishwomen, Lina’s attachment to the natural world, Scully’s resourceful dispatch of a bear and Florens’s mothers harrowing thumbnail of African and New World slavery all linger in the mind with the best moments of Sula or Beloved. But the narrative moves from character to character rather than following any one of them; this is not the kind of story in which we watch someone’s development, but rather one in which each person is captured at the moment in which they are about to become someone else. The effect is less like a novel and more like a set of dramatic monologues or linked short stories. These are by no means ignoble artistic forms, but they do tend to confirm Updike in his judgment that A Mercy has an immobility at its core. Set in early America, it doesn’t really give any sense of being at the beginning of an ongoing tale, but it seems instead to create a set of ruins in which we all still live—America is nothing other than the wreckage of the household whose decline this novel narrates.

One character, Florens, gets to tell her own story, to hold the stage for half of the book in alternating chapters, and she seems to get the kind of Bildungsroman which the other characters are denied. She goes from being a helpless, feckless teenaged lover of the beautiful, a girl who needs someone to love her to tell her who she is, to being made aware, first, of the racial difference with which her countrymen and -women will mark her, and second, of the dangerous servility her unwise dependence on the love of a man inflicts on her. She learns, in short, that she cannot rely on the world to help her but must call upon vast reserves of inner resources. At the end of the novel, Morrison reveals that Florens has indited the narration we’ve been reading not on paper but on the walls of the vain mansion her late master had built just before his death. The allegory suggests that this country is a white man’s hollow folly enlivened only by the voices of those whose labor he exploited and whose lives he stole.

So far, so hopeless.

But this is only a partial reading of the book, as if Updike were hearing only what he expects to hear from a black, female, left-wing writer. The book is called A Mercy, after all, and the mercy of the title is Florens’s mother’s sale of her to Jacob. In her concluding monologue, she explains why she regards this as merciful:

There is no protection but there is difference. You stood there in those shoes and the tall man laughed and said he would take me to close the debt. I knew Senhor would not allow it. I said you [Florens]. Take you, my daughter. Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight.

Jacob—the mercantile Protestant settler of America—is different. But from what? The novel gives an astonishing answer: he is different from the disgusting ruling class of Old Europe, embodied in the gross Portugese, and he is different from the cruel patriarchs of Africa, described by Florens’s mother as engaged in barbarous and pointless tribal warfare that enabled slavery. Jacob is not idealized, but the early pages of the novel, in which he confronts the Senhor, powerfully conveys Morrison’s sense of the newness, the unsettledness of America, a place where people can indeed become different. This corrupts Jacob and leads him to pursue riches at the expense of community, a decision which causes the other characters, black and white, master and servant, similarly to turn inward and start down the road toward institutionalized black slavery, Civil War, Jim Crow etc., but the mother’s monologue concludes with a lesson which may still be learned:

In the dust where my heart will remain each night and every day until you understand what I know and long to tell you: to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.

No static and turgid vision of a doomed country would end on this note of moral prophecy and possibility—this note, frankly, of American exceptionalism.

Let me recur to the theme of Fiction and History: I strongly suspect that some of this novel’s darkness was born in the horrors of the Bush years, while the surprising emergence of the old imperialist American myth of the city-on-a-hill owes something to the desire for national greatness and pride that led to Obama’s election.  Updike has it all wrong: Morrison’s agreeing with him! She believes in America which has most of the same letters in it as A Mercy after all.

Fiction and History is the topic of the hour: the dire Benjamin Kunkel (not as dire as his buddy Gessen, I admit) surveys with the customary literary-historical myopia of the n+1 set the apocalyptic literature/genre hybrid and its disturbance of several Trillingesque commonplaces; relatedly, the excellent Biographia Literaria examines the biases behind Newsweek’s search for the definitive Bush-era fiction and its odd choice of The Corrections, a novel which is, as everybody ought to know, completely about the ’90s. 

I think that one will quickly go astray if one looks for evidence of ’90s or ’00s fictionalization just in material that takes the headlines on directly.  Case in point: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, which this year had its twenty-year anniversary.  Not a word was mentioned in Sandman about the Clinton scandals, the Contract with America, the Rwandan genocide, the siege of Sarajevo, the dot-com bubble, the rise of the militias, the expansion of the internet or the End of History, and yet it’s difficult to imagine a piece of fiction (with the possible exception of The Corrections!) which more clearly enters a number of conversations about ethics and aesthetics that were going on in the ’90s.

For a plot summary of Sandman, see the Wikipedia. I had a very typical reading experience with the book: I read it in collections in the mid ’90s; I began reading with Dream Country when I was 12 or 13, and I was 15 when the final collection, The Wake, came out.  All through high school, I loaned the books out to people, mostly women.  In her interview in this month’s Rain Taxi, Sandman’s editor, Karen Berger, stated that she was most proud of the fact that the series had become a literary rite of passage, something that teenagers read, a millenial Catcher in the Rye or Slaughterhouse-Five (which, come to think of it, I never did get to).  Sandman certainly worked that way for me, and, as one of the most allusive teenage rite of passage books, it sent me directly out of comics and sf/fantasy to Homer, Shakespeare, Keats, Milton, Joyce and Faulkner, and is probably among the reasons I am a graduate student today (if you are reading this, Mr. Gaiman, that last bit isn’t exactly meant to strike a note of gratitude!).    

Recently, however, I undertook a sequential re-reading of the series, in my old trade paperbacks with the original Dave McKean covers, each a depiction of a face.  Life intervened and I only made it through Brief Lives, but I was struck first of all by the coherence of what had initially seemed to be a meandering series, and also by the thematic cohesiveness.  And, honestly, the book could never mean as much emotionally as it did when I was 15, but I had no idea how richly it repaid a reading at the age of 26 (close to Gaiman’s age, after all, when he began writing it).  What seemed to have been an elaborate allegory about the emotional weather of high school actually turns out to concern the decisions one makes about how to be an adult, and the options Gaiman presents have a distinctly ’90s inflection: it may be Gen-Y’s gateway drug to high literature, but when considered in the company of Slacker, Before Sunrise, Reality Bites, Nevermind, Vitalogy, Wonder Boys  and, yes, The Corrections, it’s every inch a Gen-X book, a compendium of slacker lassitude, dot-com ambition, Starbucks ennui and battle-0f-Seattle fury. 

Sandman asks this ethical and political question: Is it better to accept that the world is the way it is and its constant awful tumult will never change, and thus either do your work to the best of your ability or drop out and do your own thing on the fringes; or should you refuse to accept the reality principle and hew to ethical absolutes with the purpose of making the world better than it is?  Other options besides these are presented, of course, including the enactment of absolute evil (The Corinthian), the self-enslavement to addictive forms of fantasy (Barbie, Rachel), etc., but the two choices above seem to be the two ethical foci around which the ellipse of the text turns.

I take Death to represent the get-on-with-your-work position; her motto might be Wallace Stevens’s line, “The imperfect is our paradise.”  She stands for the local amelioration of suffering, the valorization of being-here-now and of personal responsibility.  She is genuinely kind, which goes a long way toward explaining the popularity of a character who so represents the ethos of the service industry.  Ray Mescallado long ago noticed that she was cute, but not exactly sexy; this is because, unless you are Hemingway, you will not generally wish to fuck your nurse.  Death is a prudent, Gen-X pragmatist, Winona Ryder’s character in Reality Bites.

Destruction is similar to Death in his common sense and insistence that each individual take responsibility for him- or herself, but his mode of responsibility is not the pragmatic performing of necessary tasks in an imperfect world, but rather the disengagement from a world he knows to be unjust.  A more romantic, Rabelaisian figure, Ethan Hawke but less somber, he stands for a kind of anarchism, but he’s an aesthete and an independent craftsman, a burly localvore dropout Hobbity anarchist rather than a brick-thrower.

Both of these characters, as well as some others (Rose Walker, Hazel and Foxglove, Hob Gadling, Lucifer, Matthew, Emperor Norton, Ben Jonson, etc.), stand for what came in the popular mind to be called postmodernism.  They have no ethical or metaphysical universal to which they would submit the world because they know the world’s watchword is “change” and that it’s no use trying to step in the same river twice.  That’s why Death “sees everybody,” as she always tells us, and we presume that she finds it futile to judge any of them except on the scale of their own ability to accept the world’s impermanence.

Dream, on the other hand, and not just Dream but also Orpheus and Delirium and Lyta and Remiel and Duma and Haroun al-Rashid and Robespierre and Wanda, cannot go with the flow.  To the postmodernists they reply that some things are too important simply to accept as impermanent, that our lives may be brief but that for them to be worthy they must hang on a strong nail of meaning.  Dreams’s duty, Delirium’s openness to all experience, Orpheus’s sorrow, Remiel and Duma’s God, Haroun al-Rashid’s Baghdad, Robespierre’s revolution, Wanda’s female gender, cannot be cast on the flowing waters and said a mere good-bye to.  Identity is what we refuse to give up; I can only change so much before I am no longer me.  And if I go to work at a job I hate, I cannot be me; but also if I quit the job that I hate I cannot just decamp to the country with my dog and paint pictures, I must still engage with the world on my terms.

I gather teenagers love this book because they have just had their hearts broken by their first love and they have just fought with their parents about their futures, and this first experience of adult loss and adult conflict, which they cannot just bounce back from, puts them in the camp of the absolutists, insisting on the primacy of their own ethical and emotional directives.  But then they find those perfect friends, Death and Destruction, to talk them down, to tell them that there are other fish in the sea and that college won’t be so bad and that, after all, you only get a lifetime and so you might as well make the best of it rather than moping around in the rain all day like Dream does.  The book is cheering to the heartbroken 16 year-old because it communicates the lesson you need to hear at that age, which is that it’s compromise or suicide, and compromise is more fun.

It’s a different book at 26, however, because you’ve made your compromises, you’re up to your ears in your compromises, and suddenly Death and Destruction’s encouraging voices no longer sound so friendly.  Dream’s pig-headedness unto death (or Death) seems more attractive.  

Note Gaiman’s exemplary intellectual honesty here: the valorization of change for its own sake is ultimately the valorization of death and destruction.  Hence, what prompts Destruction to quit his post is the invention of scientific ideology in the Enlightenment, that intellectual movement which will spread the pro-change mantra, in techno-capitalist and techno-communist forms, to the four corners of the globe.  But his retreat is reactive and self-serving, a personal lifestyle politics that doesn’t attempt to intervene in the world it finds so oppressive.  Sandman’s earth-toned color palette, its atmosphere of wooden furniture, green-glass wine bottles and old libraries indexes what change and death and destruction are taking away from us; it reminds us, at the End of History, that “progress” comes at a great price.

However, Dream rejects the postmodern insistence on impermanence, hybridity, pragmatism and openness; he cleaves to his ethical absolutes, to his duty, and what happens?  All of the bad things that postmodernists warn us about: not to put too fine a point on it, Dream oppresses women, and, in the worst case, he enslaves a woman of color.  He reminds us that western empire is not just change, but also a plan to put the world under one rule, and when Nada will not agree to live in his world he consigns her to hell.  The absolute and the unyielding exact a toll, just as change and the acceptance of impermanence does.  

The book never really chooses sides, but exhibits admirable negative capability.  It’s up to us to decide how we wish to act in this most imperfect world; Sandman does not answer our ethical questions, nor should it, but it asks them with great wit and intensity.

What makes it a superb work of literature is the fact that the ethical quandary expresses itself at the formal level, for generically Sandman is a taut Shakespearean tragedy attenuated within a cantering, leisurely magic-realist novel, as if Macbeth were pieced out like breadcrumbs through a Rushdie tale.  In other words, the two forms, the pre-modern one made to describe the unyielding soul’s crushing encounter with resistless fate, and the post-modern one that embodies multiple perspectives, colliding communities, and ultimately meaningless but celebratory metamorphoses, coexist uneasily, as the text’s two worldviews jostle each other.  It’s as if Gaiman, realizing the triumph of the postmodern, the reign of change and of acceptance-of-death, wanted to write one last tragedy.  That is a greater ambition than most other writers showed in the same period and, strange as it seems, Gaiman managed to get that period into a work which looks like it’s about every time and no time; and, if I may venture a severe and absolute judgment, that makes it a book for all time.