For those of you who subscribe to Commentary, here is an excellent review by Cheryl Miller of a new novel that you really should read. (That is, you really should read the review, not necessarily the novel.)
For those of you who don't, here's a taste of what you're missing by not reading the review or the novel:
It's the 1680s, and there's an Anabaptist community (think Amish) in New York, Milton, where lives a freethinking Dutchman named Vaark. Being a freethinker among Anabaptists, he doesn't exactly fit in. So he and his wife live in isolation on their farm, along with a young Native American woman they've taken in, one Lina, whose family and tribe died of smallpox, an African woman named Sorrow who went crazy during her passage to America on a slave ship, an African-American girl, Florens, who was given to Mr. Vaark by her mother in payment of her master's debt, and two male homosexual farm hands. This group of outcasts live in a kind of Edenic harmony (is Milton anywhere near Woodstock?) until Mr. Vaark gets bitten by the greedy capitalist bug and destroys their idyllic existence. (Notice how deftly I managed to avoid giving away any plot spoilers.)
The novel, then, narrates an unremarkable series of events for late-17th-century America, involving a pretty average household of that day. What sets the book apart is the writing--or the style, for you literary types--and the character development and the richness of historical detail.
At one point, for example, Florens says, "I like talk. Lina talk, stone talk, ever Sorrow talk"--a lovely picture of semi-literate rusticity if ever there was one. At another point, she says, "I am moving north where the sapling bends into the earth with a sprout that points to the sky. Then west to you." The reader is obviously meant to realize a deep truth about Florens--that she has at some point taken a remedial grammar course followed by a creative writing seminar--though this is never mentioned explicitly.
Or consider Lina's grief at Mr. Vaark's cutting down fifty trees without having first "asked their permission." Or her diagnosis of what is destroying him and them--apart from the obvious problems that "he is a man" and "a Europe": "Cut loose from the earth’s soul they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples." (If that analysis rings a bell, it's because it's straight out of Marx's Paris Manuscripts of 1845--or any of countless neo-Marxian discussions of alienated labor. Oh, sorry. Marx must have fished the ideas out of the residue of Native American wisdom--something he did, perhaps, during his period as a correspondent for a New York newspaper.)
Or this gem of the writer's craft: "Whatever each one loved, sought or escaped, their futures were separate and anyone’s guess." Ouch. A little dropoff in the level of formality there.
STOP! What is going on here? What feebly written, pathetic piece of trash is this? Why is Commentary running a review of some self-published bit of illiteracy that some poor deluded person who doesn't know any better has paid to have printed and listed on Amazon? Shouldn't we just pass over this kind of ephemera in silence, and spare the feelings of whatever wannabe author produced this junk?
Well, the novel in question is A Mercy, the latest creation of Toni Morrison--who, you may recall, won the Nobel Prize (for literature!) back in 1993, and is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus; Special Consultant to the Director of the Princeton Atelier; and Lecturer with the rank of Professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts, all at Princeton University.
What we have here, in short, is an example of the historical, cultural, and literary illiteracy begotten upon higher academia by multiculturalism, relativism, deconstructionism, post-colonialism, neo-Marxianism, Freudianism, oppression studies, and a host of other isms and attitudes that often get lumped together as postmodernism--a cloud of unknowing that has been called "diversitarianism."
What to call such a book? It isn't a historical novel, clearly. I thought of calling it an "anachronistic novel," but that lacks punch. Let's dub this sort of thing the "unhistorical novel." It comforts me to know that it isn't only evangelicals who write them.
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