Who would turn down a show of leniency? Certainly not the characters in Joan Silber's Mercy. That some of them get it and some of them don't adds to the complexity of this work, which contains multiple protagonists and cleverly interlocking stories. The novel has two fulcrums, one of which is the New York City emergency room that otherwise unrelated characters have the misfortune to need. In the first set of stories, it's 1973, and Ivan and Eddie are longtime pals whose adventures are dominated by hardcore drug use, predominantly heroin. As Ivan puts it, "My true home was where my beloved substance was." When Eddie overdoses, Ivan rushes his unconscious friend to the ER, only to take off into the January night and leave him stranded.
At the same time, 10-year-old Cara slips on a snowy fire escape outside her apartment and has to go to the same ER because she has "broken and splintered [her] tibia in a fairly major way." Part of the richness of this novel is the way Silber (Secrets of Happiness) deepens these stories, from Eddie's actress girlfriend, who goes on to a successful if turbulent Hollywood career, to Cara's friend Nini, who attends grad school for anthropology and gets a choice fieldwork assignment thanks to the married British professor she's sleeping with. All of which leads to the novel's second fulcrum: the concept of forgiveness in all its manifestations. It all gets quite complicated, just like the notion of mercy itself, but the result is this elegantly rewarding work. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer