Working through the morass of new fiction can be just that. The established names come and go—Pynchon, McEwan—perhaps not talking of Michelangelo, but somehow commodified, even when the authors are assiduously avoiding it. All the more reason to appreciate the subtleties of Joan Silber’s work.
Her latest novel, Mercy (Counterpoint; 256 pages), manages to be at once a street-smart account of the perils of shooting heroin as a party game among East Village friends and a Canterbury Tales of a carefully constructed set of characters whose paths cross in seemingly coincidental (but non-Dickensian) ways. The connections depicted, and their consequences, are not just seen through the eye of a hypodermic needle, but in exquisite accounts of the illimitable difficulties of relationships among family, lovers, and friends.
There’s a theological element at work here, too – the title is no accident – though Silber lets it grow on us as the larger narrative unfolds.
The story opens decades ago, with a disastrous close encounter between best friends Eddie and Ivan, who’ve weaved their way back to New York after drug-filled stints in Amsterdam and London. Things take a terrible turn when Eddie’s girlfriend, Ginger, expresses interest in what sounds like a promising narcotized session at his apartment, provided by Ivan’s dealer. Ginger throws up—not an unusual experience for casual users—then, Silber writes, “Eddie slumped back. He was in the Land of Nod.’’
Ivan grabs a cab to take him to St. Vincent’s but abandons his buddy in the emergency room, worried about the consequences of bringing in an OD.
Leaving his friend for dead, he splits, reflecting: “People were charged. Intent to distribute a controlled substance. I didn’t imagine myself doing well in prison.’’
This is territory that has been explored before, by Burroughs, most prominently, and Denis Johnson, among countless others, but the approach here is less performative.
Silber then traces the parallel journeys of Cara and Nini, two teenage girls embarked on self-discovery. Cara splits for Arizona with her worthless boyfriend, returning home (the place, as we are told, where they have to take you in) when he deserts her. But in a vivid flashback, she recalls her own journey to St. Vincent’s as a ten-year-old after she fell off a fire escape. As her mother pleads with a nurse to get her looked after, the lone man—Eddie—slumped on the seat next to Cara clearly demands more immediate attention.
No spoilers here, but all is not what it seems. Ginger’s life takes a surprising celebrity turn, and Ivan slowly finds his path with help from a twelve-step program (though he keeps some of his past to himself). “What blew me away were the stories people told,” he muses. “They’d betrayed small children and wrecked whole families and burned down the houses of kind lovers. I was an amateur as an addict compared to them. Except that I wasn’t. I ran out on my friend when he was dying.”
Meanwhile, in the spirit of the soap operas Ginger appeared on in her youth, Cara finds a career, fittingly, as a “genetic counselor” and is a single mother with two daughters. A surprise email from her father, who’d long abandoned his family, takes her to Bali where he’s been surviving (barely) as an expat bartender while nearing death.
What is one to make of these complex lives? Is forgiveness in order?
Leave it to the left-behind to find a road to forgiveness. Silber’s connection to our fallibility and resilience is as deep as it is welcome. Have mercy, indeed.
ZYZZYVA Contributing Editor Paul Wilner is a longtime member of the National Book Critics Circle. A book columnist for the Nob Hill Gazette, his reviews have appeared in Alta, among many other publications.