PanThe AtlanticThere is too much common ground among these characters for the reader to have an easy time keeping them apart. A little conflict might have helped, but Morrison will not even let them compete for a visiting blacksmith—a free black man and, it would seem, the only attractive male in the New World. Perhaps this tendency to idealize the exploited is part of our literary tradition as a whole ... Morrison, too, is so busy showcasing her characters’ nobility that we get little sense of what hardship can really do to the human spirit ... A Mercy might still have held the reader’s attention had it ignored the contemporary taboo against straightforward, sequential storytelling. But this is in effect a series of backstories, some told in the narrator’s affected voice, some in the characters’ scatty idiom, but all moving at the same uninvolving expository trot. Back and forth the book goes over the same period, summing up this life, then that, with more crude sarcasm brought to bear on colonial society...than sincere effort to understand it ... Months, years, and entire character transformations are dispatched in a few enumerative sentences ... A Mercy is eked out with a few set pieces, but even they rush us through; the book never seems to settle into narrative \'real time.\' For all its cheerlessness, the novel is anything but grittily realistic. Some scenes, such as one in which a character gets out of her bath \'aslide with wintergreen,\' evince an effort to make even these miserable lives picturesque. But Morrison’s failure to evoke the period is more the fault of her all-too-contemporary prose style[.]
