If all this sounds too depressing for your second pandemic winter: I promise it is not! Like most novels of this type, these characters’ story lines intersect in unexpected and moving ways. Haigh deftly walks across the fault line of one of the most divisive issues of our age, peeling back ideology and revealing what all ideology refuses to recognize: an individual’s humanity. This in itself is an act of mercy ... argues, both in form and content, that compassion is a powerful counterpoint to the conflict-driven stories that dominate our news cycles, our news feeds and our Netflix queues. In Haigh’s world, in other words, mercy may no longer be fashionable, but it sure is necessary.
Haigh’s style is so unflashy. All she does is write straightforwardly about people she seems to know inside out. They’re the kinds of people who don’t often get close attention. Her books might feel traditional if she relied on simple structure, but she likes Altmanesque ways of weaving characters together. In her case, there’s nothing woozy to it. When some of these people collide, the eureka moments feel like car crashes ... Haigh does as well with the book’s embittered male figures as she does with a woman whose beliefs she likely shares. They could easily be caricatures, but she tries to plumb their anger.
It has to be difficult to fashion entertaining or edifying fiction from the freighted world of abortion politics, and Haigh succeeds only sporadically. In attempting to portray both camps, she falls into caricature, particularly in the character of Victor, an unremittingly hateful and ignorant abortion opponent. This is not to imply that he is unrealistic or unfamiliar; sadly, he is neither. But reading about people who solely elicit revulsion is both exhausting and not terribly interesting ... Surely there are clinics that only serve at-risk populations, but the dour mood feels at odds with the book’s dedication 'to the one in three,' cited in the text as the percentage of American women who 'would, at some point, terminate a pregnancy.' Clearly women seek an abortion for reasons besides being homeless or addicted or underage or living with a murderer; many do find a happy ending ... Claudia and Victor are on a collision course, one abruptly averted via lazy deus ex machina. An extended saccharine epilogue closes Claudia’s story with an upbeat bow, and allows Victor more unwanted bile, but the attempt at a happy ending seems, particularly in 2022, incredibly unlikely and far away.
... surprisingly restrained ... likely to be the last abortion-focused novel that appears before our newly reconstituted Supreme Court reasserts the state’s control of women’s bodies. And yet it’s not so much a clarion call as a melancholy appraisal of the stalemate that has long held sway in the United States ... Haigh seems well aware of the heavy curtain that’s been drawn across these services. Much of her novel is devoted to demystifying this quotidian work ... carefully sketches out the geography of poverty, that invisible realm that lies just beyond the horizon of middle-class life. Without condescension or sentimentality, Haigh describes people who aspire to live in a double-wide trailer, who must decide between paying the water bill and the cable bill, who feel the humiliation of using food stamps. Indeed, that life was Claudia’s adolescence, a background that makes her particularly attuned to the logic of the clinic’s poorer clients ... avoids any such climactic melodrama and stays true to its fundamental decency ... Is it too much to wish this novel is not just hopeful but prophetic?
There’s a great deal of disgruntled vitality in this novel, which unfolds during a succession of snowstorms ... But while Mercy Street is terrifically readable, it lacks some of the friction of [Haigh's previous novel] Heat and Light simply because many of its scenes (especially those involving Victor Prine) depict people alone on their computers. Technology poses a problem that the social novelist has not yet resolved: If no one meets in person any more, how do you make the sparks fly?
Haigh excels at depicting people beaten down by life, but it’s hard to feel much sympathy for her drearily drawn male protagonists, who are less nuanced individuals than indistinguishable stereotypes. With the anti-abortion movement gathering steam in the legislative arena, her portrait feels dated ... Despite its flaws, Haigh’s novel will provide plenty of discussion fodder for reading groups.
... layered if frustrating ... The set up is strong and culminates in Victor deciding to travel to Boston from his log cabin in Pennsylvania to 'save' Claudia, but the narrative runs out of steam just as it gets going. Haigh doesn’t successfully weave the different narrative threads, delving into what leads men to become violent antichoice activists, for instance, but leaving the female characters disappointingly unexplored. There are some solid building blocks, but they crumble into an unsatisfying resolution. This doesn’t hit the high marks it aims for.
