May 19, 2022
Mercy Street, by Jennifer Haigh
I spent a few days last week utterly gripped by Jennifer Haigh’s novel Mercy Street, which I picked up after reading a New York Times review and after someone else had mentioned it to me as being a novel about abortion. A bit like Jessica Winter’s The Fourth Child, in that it’s a novel about abortion as much as it’s a novel about anything, a story propelled by its own internal engine, which is just what a novel should be, I think.
This one beginning at a Boston abortion clinic during a brutal winter in recent times where a woman called Claudia counsels those arriving for various reasons—unwanted pregnancies, birth control, other health concerns. Haigh’s novel underlining the huge range of situations which bring a person to an abortion clinic, to have an abortion at all, some of them brutal and devastating, desperate and tragic, and others much more mundane. What does it mean for the addict who sits before Claudia, for example, to have to continue with her pregnancy? (Abortion in Massachusetts is legal only until the 24th week of pregnancy.)
Claudia enters the novel with her own story, of course—her mother was a teen-mom, she grew up in a poverty, a background she overcame for success writing for women’s magazines and a brief first marriage. She’s still friends with her ex, but her job in journalism is far behind her, Claudia finding more meaning counselling women who come to the Mercy Street Clinic, but the job is a lot, and there’s a weight on her that’s far heavier than the keys she possesses to her late mother’s single-wide trailer in Maine, a property Claudia has put off doing anything about for a very long time.
Claudia finds solace in smoking cannabis, and in the company of Timmy, her dealer, who’s trying to think of a different way to provide for himself and support his teenaged son who lives in Florida, and the narrative moves from Claudia to him, and then to Anthony, one of Timmy’s clients, who’s been on disability for years, still lives with his mother, attends mass daily at a local church, and takes care of local parishes’ websites. His online dealings putting him in touch with an antiabortion crusader called Vince who, over the past two decades, has been radicalized by the white supremacist undertones (and lately overtones) of talk radio, and is setting out a plan that could have devastating consequences.
This is a novel about a butterfly who flaps its wings, about fate, and agency, and how one thing, for better or for worse, leads to another. Gripping, galvanizing, sympathetic, and infuriating, I enjoyed Mercy Street so much.
