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Eds. Shirley A. Stave and Justine Tally. Toni Morrison's A Mercy: Critical Approaches. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. 160 pp. $52.99.
Of Toni Morrison's last six novels, A Mercy (2008) provides the lone title prefaced with an article that specifies the presence or, in this case, absence of definiteness of the noun. A motif echoing throughout her oeuvre, the presence of absence is also, in this case, reflected by Morrison's clearly and frequently stated intention to explore a time before American slavery became identified with race. In their 2011 collection of essays, Shirley A. Stave andJustine Tally set out to present "a reader's guide to A Mercy, a storehouse of various approaches" that will not only provide Morrison scholars and students with "an assortment of avenues" into the text's treatment of race, broadly interpreted, difference and absence, but of other social determiners such as gender, religion, geography, and class (1). And they do.
In tribute to them, I attempt in this review not only to provide an overview and assessment of those critical approaches, but to engage with them as the editors intend. The book begins with an exploration of geographic, ecological, and domestic space as defined by James Braxton Peterson and AnissaJanine Wardi. While this reader finds Peterson's essay to rely a tad too heavily on critical jargon, I do appreciate the cutting edge of a piece that, rightly, critiques Morrison's among contemporary ecocritical texts: "It is in/through relationships between hypothetical and (regular/ normal) focalization that certain eco-critical and narratological understandings emerge in close readings of Morrison's A Mercy" (10). I also owe to this opening chapter the location of several pieces needing critical alignment in the literary puzzle that is the novel.
First, Peterson concurs with Wardi and reviewer La Vinia DeloisJennings, who designate its setting as colonial Maryland and Virginia.Jennings writes elsewhere: "A third-person narrator from a limited perspective provides the back stories for Florens,Jacob and the other characters who live or work onJacob's burgeoning Virginia estate." Doubting in my usual Hamletesque fashion my own decision that Vaark's farm would lie in what we now call upstate New York, I appeal to two other respected Morrison scholars, wailing, "Well, what about the moose?" I envy the definiteness of an immediate reply from...