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Named a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe
"Ms. Haigh is an expertly nuanced storyteller long overdue for major attention. Her work is gripping, real, and totally immersive, akin to that of writers as different as Richard Price, Richard Ford, and Richard Russo."â??Janet Maslin, New York Times
The highly praised, "extraordinary" (New York Times Book Review) novel about the disparate lives that intersect at a women's clinic in Boston, by New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Haigh
For almost a decade, Claudia has counseled patients at Mercy Street, a clinic in the heart of the city. The work is consuming, the unending dramas of women in crisis. For its patients, Mercy Street offers more than health care; for many, it is a second chance.
But outside the clinic, the reality is different. Anonymous threats are frequent. A small, determined group of anti-abortion demonstrators appears each morning at its door. As the protests intensify, fear creeps into Claudia's days, a humming anxiety she manages with frequent visits to Timmy, an affable pot dealer in the midst of his own existential crisis. At Timmy's, she encounters a random assortment of customers, including Anthony, a lost soul who spends most of his life online, chatting with the mysterious Excelsior11â??the screenname of Victor Prine, an anti-abortion crusader who has set his sights on Mercy Street and is ready to risk it all for his beliefs.
Mercy Street is a novel for right now, a story of the polarized American present. Jennifer Haigh, "an expert natural storyteller with a keen sense of her characters' humanity" (New York Times), has written a groundbreaking novel, a fearless examination of one of the most divisive issues of our time… (altro)
Engrossing and tense novel centering on a women's reproductive health care clinic located on Mercy Street in Boston during the punishing winter of 2015. The characterizations, particularly of Claudia, a clinic worker and main character, but also of the other main characters, are strong and believable. Claudia is passionate about her job but the bad parts of it -- the patients she can't help, or won't let themselves be helped, the constant and intimidating presence of anti-abortion protestors, coupled with her somewhat unsuccessful attempts to erase her past life and unconventional upbringing, are taking a severe toll on her emotional health. The story illustrates the dark forces surrounding the anti-abortion and white supremacist movements and how they menace the rest of society. It was hard to read, but hard to put down.
Trigger warning: This is not an easy read and deals with issues of abortion, poverty, opinions on government, religion, and other heavy topics.
In 2015 on Ash Wednesday, a major Nor'easter was predicted for the Boston area of Massachusetts which isn't an unusual occurrence but the angry protestors outside of the Mercy Street Women's Clinic rises to a fearful level. Being from Boston I could visually imagine the scene which she depicts pretty accurately in the Chinatown and Charlestown districts of Boston. The neighborhoods have historically not been densely populated with diverse cultures. Beliefs and judgements tend to be strongly ingrained from birth so tensions run high on a religious day in particular at an abortion clinic.
Claudia Birch has worked as a counselor for many years mostly ignoring the determined anti-abortion protesters each morning and the frequent anonymous death threats that littered the clinic. Aside from the stress of her job she also has the responsibility of checking on her childhood "house" in Maine. She grew up with her mother, Deb, in a trailer where her mother took in many foster kids for the money provided for their care. She went to Boston where she obtained a degree in social work most likely as a result of growing up in poverty. She hasn't elevated her status as she often finds herself visiting Tim Flynn for weed to alleviate her anxiety. There are a few memorable characters in this novel representative of the stereotypical extremes on social issues.
Anthony Blanchard is a traditional Catholic who suffering a brain injury on site at his construction job. He lives in his mother's basement surviving with the help of marijuana and maintaining a schedule of daily Mass and visits to the clinic. He spends time online focusing on abortion although his brain injury makes it difficult for him to make any sound explanations for the protests against abortion. He finds solace being in the company of other people so feels drawn to be accepted by others.
Victor Prine is the catalyst of violence in the story with his misogynist, racist opinions shaped from being raised in poverty by a prostitute mother. He listens to Doug Straight who has a radio show spewing his doomsday, racist theories. Victor also holds a strong position online sharing his angry white supremist views which evolves into full-blown anti-government ideology where he begins stockpiling weapons. He is clearly the most unstable of characters depicted which eventually leads to a confrontation at Mercy Clinic which has everyone considering their lives and what matters most in life.
Thank you to Ecco and NetGalley for the opportunity to read the ARC of this book. This review is my unbiased and voluntary opinion. ( )
OK, wow. Mercy Street is Jennifer Haigh’s best book yet, and that’s saying a lot. Just finished listening to this on audio. Narrated perfectly by Stacey Glembosky, who doesn’t overdo the accents for the characters in Boston, Maine, and Midwest. You might think a book set in and around a women's health clinic that provides abortions would be grim and message-y but the author has fully developed, believable characters with close and distant connections to the Mercy Street clinic and makes the motivations of even the whacko extremists on the anti-abortionist side understandable. ( )
Haigh does a great job of bringing the complexities of women and pregnancy to light. I appreciated the struggles Claudia had and how she dealt with her life - it felt real and not stereotypical. I am curious about Anthony - I liked him and I assume Haight meant for him to be a sympathetic character. I also appreciated that she didn't wrap up the novel with a tidy ending. ( )
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I'm walking up and down Beacon Hill searching for a street sign— namely MERCY STREET. Not there.
I try the Back Bay. Not there. Not there. —ANNE SEXTON
Dedica
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For the one in four
Incipit
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It's hard to know, ever, where a story begins. We touch down in a world fully inhabited by others, a drama already in progress. By the time we make our entrance—incontinent and screaming, like dirty bombs detonating—the climax is a distant memory. Our arrival is not the beginning; it is a consequence.
Citazioni
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In ten months of dating they had discovered no common interests beyond sex and dinner, a common condition among couples who'd met online.
On the front porch, Timmy—she didn't know his last name—was smoking a cigarette, a big beefy guy with pale blue eyes and the terminally startled look of a person with blond eyebrows.
The bed was unmade, the floor littered with dirty clothes, like the lair of some furtive, hibernating male creature.
Wedlock. The word sounded ominous, punitive, faintly medieval.
In Miami the sirens were screaming. Timmy was selling drugs while watching a TV show about drug crime. He was aware of the absurdity of this.
Marcel's entire biography would fit on a Bazooka comic, a scrap of paper so small you could swallow it whole.
Nicotine-stained teeth, the color of buckwheat honey, gave him a rakish air.
He counted off tens and twenties, grubby pothead money from the roll in his pocket, bulging there like a giant hard-on.
Stone, he was expansive, professorial—the kind of pothead who lives to explain the world to other potheads.
The truth was inescapable: when weed was legalized, Timmy would become a displaced worker, like his dad when Raytheon closed the plant in Northboro. The legal weed business would be run by lawyers and bankers, the same douchebags who ran everything else in the world.
Timmy didn't understand golf but found it soothing: the rolling green lawns, the announcers speaking in hushed voices as though a baby were sleeping.
But Timmy, disconcertingly, had no memory of saying such a thing to Winky. He wondered, not for the first time, if he was smoking too much weed.
He'd been told he had a problem with authority. He didn't like hearing it, which proved it was entirely true.
Never in a million years would he qualify for such a loan—a fact he understood on a cellular level, which was why the thought hadn't occurred to him and never would. His own calculus was simpler: To open a Laundromat, he needed a pile of money. To make a pile of money, he had to sell a pile of weed.
IT WAS HARD TO BELIEVE THEY'D EVER BEEN MARRIED. Claudia's recollections of that time were blurred photocopies, memories of memories of memories. She hadn't disliked it, exactly. Married life was like walking around in shoes that almost fit. She wore them every day for two years, and still they gave her blisters. Like most shoes designed for women, they were not foot-shaped.
The saints were prayed to for specific purposes: seasonable weather, relief of headaches, the protection of firefighters. Each saint was in charge of his own department, like middle management in a corporation.
Hind-sight was always twenty-twenty, which was the only thing anybody ever said about it.
At morning Mass he studied the old people, the embers of his Church, and pondered its disintegration. The Church was like an old car driven past its limit, to the stage where everything broke down at once: brakes, transmission, the decrepit engine running hot. The Church was basically flying to pieces.
A little-known fact was he'd like to have a family. Not his own kids, necessarily: he wouldn't mind taking over ones that some other guy had started. In a way, he'd prefer it. For some guys it was all ego, passing along their genes and whatnot. Anthony figured his genes were something the world could go on without.
Lately he got the sense that his mother thought he was gay, an impression he didn't bother to correct because the truth was even less flattering.
He was given a PET scan and a CAT scan but curiously, no dog scan.
Days got longer, shorter, longer. Warmer, colder, warmer. In this way, years passed.
THEY HAD KNOWN EACH OTHER FOR SIX MONTHS, IN THE PECULIAR way strangers know each other online: screen name, alleged age and gender and whatever else the other chose to reveal or embellish or outright fabricate about himself.
To Anthony, who had never impregnated anyone and had little hope of doing so, abortion was a distant, abstract problem—a thing you were supposed to care about, like the national debt.
IT ALL CAME DOWN TO NUMBERS. This was the organizing principle of democracy, a truth baked into the system: The majority owned the minority. In a well-functioning democracy, the minority was the majority's bitch.
Junie had a son his own age, a shy, undersized kid who stuttered when nervous, a choke chain of consonants jammed in his mouth.
Victor chose his words carefully. Luther Cross was a talker. Telling him anything was like writing it in the sky.
Women who refused to be women were no better—they were far worse—than men who refused to be men.
If breasts were a consumer product, the manufacturer would be forced to issue a recall.
The old man jammed an index finger into one ear and twiddled violently, as though he had an itch in his brain.
"There is no more Stuart. Stuart is gonzo," she said. Whether he'd stopped calling, or she had simply stopped answering, wasn't clear and didn't matter. It was another argument in favor of the e-boyfriend—the most persuasive one, really. There was no need, ever, for a nasty breakup. There was simply nothing to break.
If you happen to be a female, all problems were female problems. Failure to perform scheduled maintenance may void the warranty.
Thinking about that now, decades later, made him sad, how a kid could learn, without ever being told, that some things could never be.
At such moments he felt unfairly punished, by the someone or something that had decided, long ago, that every ordinary human pleasure was off-limits to him.
HE WAS AT THE STAGE OF LIFE WHEN A MAN LOOKED BACKWARD. There was so much life behind him and—no point in denying it—so little ahead.
LIFE HAPPENS IN INCREMENTS. EARLY HUMANS UNDERSTOOD this, and so they invented time, a way of parsing the eternal.
HOSPITAL DAYS WERE LIKE PRISON DAYS, LONG AND EMPTY. Victor ate and shat and ate again, like a factory-farmed chicken. Mealtimes were the only events worth noting, the highlight of his day.
IN PREGNANCY SHE WAS ALWAYS TIRED. MAKING A PERSON, IT turned out, was exhausting work.
Ultime parole
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Soon, soon, she would give birth to her mother. In the dream she had found this ridiculous, but also correct and delightful. It was the best possible thing.
Named a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe
"Ms. Haigh is an expertly nuanced storyteller long overdue for major attention. Her work is gripping, real, and totally immersive, akin to that of writers as different as Richard Price, Richard Ford, and Richard Russo."â??Janet Maslin, New York Times
The highly praised, "extraordinary" (New York Times Book Review) novel about the disparate lives that intersect at a women's clinic in Boston, by New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Haigh
For almost a decade, Claudia has counseled patients at Mercy Street, a clinic in the heart of the city. The work is consuming, the unending dramas of women in crisis. For its patients, Mercy Street offers more than health care; for many, it is a second chance.
But outside the clinic, the reality is different. Anonymous threats are frequent. A small, determined group of anti-abortion demonstrators appears each morning at its door. As the protests intensify, fear creeps into Claudia's days, a humming anxiety she manages with frequent visits to Timmy, an affable pot dealer in the midst of his own existential crisis. At Timmy's, she encounters a random assortment of customers, including Anthony, a lost soul who spends most of his life online, chatting with the mysterious Excelsior11â??the screenname of Victor Prine, an anti-abortion crusader who has set his sights on Mercy Street and is ready to risk it all for his beliefs.
Mercy Street is a novel for right now, a story of the polarized American present. Jennifer Haigh, "an expert natural storyteller with a keen sense of her characters' humanity" (New York Times), has written a groundbreaking novel, a fearless examination of one of the most divisive issues of our time
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