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.