question: when is a critic not a critic?

Answer: When he's a cheerleader.

Here are some excerpts from what the "critics" have had to say about A Mercy--taken from the publisher's puff page, which has scores of these--with my comments in curly braces:

"Ms. Morrison has rediscovered an urgent, poetic voice that enables her to move back and forth with immediacy and ease between the worlds of history {oh?} and myth {that part is evident}, between ordinary daily life and the realm of fable." (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times)

"Rich knowledgeability {is that anything like knowledge?} about 17th-century America is put to telling effect." (Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times)

"Morrison doesn’t write traditional novels so much as create a hypnotic state of poetic intoxication. You don’t read A Mercy, you fall into a miasma of language and symbolism. [It] offers an original vision of America in its primeval state, where freedom was a rare commodity." (Deirdre Donahue, USA Today) {Where do I begin?}

"What’s the opposite of ‘lazy’ in a fiction writer’s style and research? Industrious? Indefatigable? Morrison wears her knowledge lightly {that's for sure}, yet every page exhibits her control {?} of [the 17th century’s] objects and artifacts, its worries and dangers. She surrounds A Mercy’s more fanciful arabesques with a broad border of realism. . . . A book as masterfully wrought as A Mercy behooves its author {can a book behoove an author?} to swagger." (Carlin Romano, The Philadelphia Inquirer)

And then there is this gem: "The stories in A Mercy are as layered and contested as the barely mapped topology traversed by its characters." (Neda Ulaby, NPR) {Do you think she might have meant topography? Or does Prof. Morrison also have a role in Princeton's mathematics department?}

My favorite comment on the book comes from the author herself (quoted by Cheryl Miller): "I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it was like, or it could have been like..." How do you look, with or without blinking, at what something could have been like (if you're not God)?

I grant that she's not exactly a critic, but then she might as well be.