The Book of Mercy
By Kathleen Cambor
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 262 pages, $22
In an opening scene of “The Book of Mercy,” Kathleen Cambor’s affecting first novel, Anne Mueller, one of the main characters, is challenged by her psychiatry students to explain why she values the stories her patients tell her. In response, she tells a story of her own about her mother, Fanny, whose forsaking of home and family left an indelible mark that is the focal point of this novel:
” `What about the truth?’ (the students ask). And I say, Forget truth, what matters is the way it felt, the tale you tell about it. My specialty is infants and mothers. How they come together, how they fit. . . . What is it about mother love that makes so much of life revolve around it? The need for Fanny fueled Edmund, Paul and me. No matter how we all pretended, missing her was at the center of everything we did. When ordinary living couldn’t satisfy our hunger for her, we all turned to magic, nothing less would do. Alchemy, God, psychiatry. Extreme attempts to fill the void, but I guess that’s how big the void was. In many ways we hardly knew her, rarely talked about her. One day we just went our separate ways and took up magic. We are Edmund the father, Anne the daughter, Paul the priestly son. This is our story.”
First-person narration by Anne alternates by chapter with narration in the third person by her father, Edmund. Their story begins with the loss of Fanny. A switchboard operator for the telephone company, the temperamental Fanny quits her job to marry Edmund, a fireman, in the fall of 1937. They settle down in a working-class section of Pittsburgh, in a small, brick, two-story house on Jeffers Street, which Fanny frantically redecorates. She paints the living room green and the dining room purple with a yellow ceiling.
By night Fanny goes dancing and to movies with Edmund. Finally, the excitement of first love having worn thin, Fanny decides to try her luck at motherhood. She becomes pregnant and takes to her bed after her son, Paul, is born. When Anne is born a couple of years later, she takes off altogether, for a career in show business.
“There are names now for what was wrong with Fanny, there are drugs to treat it. But then there was only a general practitioner, the falsely hopeful reassurances of friends,” the narrator says. The presumably manic-depressive Fanny briefly reappears at the house on Jeffers Street on one or two occasions and touches down by postcard as her children grow, but for the most part she has flown, leaving her family with a feeling of abandonment from which they never recover. In the novel, Cambor attempts, with varying success, to plumb the depths of their loss.
The theme of magic haunts the book. Anne’s brother, Paul, becomes a Catholic missionary priest, traveling the world in search of souls to heal; Anne becomes a doctor, seeking to perform medical miracles; and their father, Edmund, in his retirement from the fire department, turns the basement on Jeffers Street into an alchemy lab. (“Base metals transformed into gold, new life born from a fistfull of ashes. Amazing things, thought Edmund.”)
Edmund reads everything pertaining to magic that he can lay his hands on. “He filled his house, his time, himself with all he read. Remaking himself in some other image, someone fit to be a father to smart children, an able, knowing wise man.”
The struggle to remake, to transform and to somehow change one’s life after a sudden reversal is a great drama on which many stories hinge. In her attempt to engage the reader in the Mueller family’s struggles, Cambor avoids heavy-handed use of flashbacks, which can bog down a narrative of this kind.
However, the alternating voices in “The Book of Mercy” have a rushed, almost shorthand method of describing things that contributes to an overall blurriness. One can never quite picture the characters or situations in this novel. Similarly, the sometimes overly knowing voice of Anne skims over situations that seem to need deeper exploration, as when, having just left home for college at Penn State, she tries to understand why she suddenly feels lonely.
“Life on Jeffers Street had been subdued and slow. . . . Now I often think that if anyone had seen us then, the muted way we lived in those silent rooms, we would have looked as if we were moving in slow motion . . . divers weighed down with equipment, weaving through their cloudy underwater world.
“Because of that, right after I left home, I had no filter in place for processing experience. All the light and color at Penn State hurt my eyes after the dreariness of Pittsburgh.”
Subdued? Muted? What about that purple dining room with the yellow ceiling? The “filter in place for processing” seems like so much psychobabble clouding the main issue. The failure to render the emotional impact of Fanny’s loss on her husband and children, in precise language and imaginative detail, makes it difficult for the reader to feel any connection to their struggle.
And yet, despite its flaws, “The Book of Mercy” has warmth and intelligence at its core, a not inconsiderable achievement that makes one hope to hear more from this very promising writer.
