Photo by Shari Diamond

Silber—the great chronicler of the webs of love and coincidence that connect people—turns her attention to drugs and sex and mercy.

Again here, in her 10th work of fiction, Silber uses her signature form—interconnected stories with a rotating point-of-view—to bound through time and around the globe. The central characters are two pairs of friends, connected by a tiny moment in the emergency room of St. Vincent’s, a long-gone hospital in Greenwich Village. Ivan and Eddie were inseparable in their 1970s glory days, but part of their connection was that they were drug buddies, and this leads to Ivan making a mistake for which he can never forgive himself. Also involved was Eddie’s girlfriend Ginger, whose later glamorous trajectory projects her image into their lives for decades. The second pair is Cara and Nini, whose chapters glitter with Silberian wisdom about relationships. When Cara looks back on her wild early romantic history, she notes that “lust was a big deal in the world around [her]; people believed in sex in a way that they don’t quite anymore.” Simlarly, anthropology grad student and serial monogamist Nini can’t help but wonder, “How did anyone get anything done with love in the world?” This actually becomes her field of specialization, love and courtship in a group called the Mien based in Thailand and China. The question of whether Ivan and Eddie will reconnect hangs over the book, even as the meaning and limits of mercy are explored. It can be anything from finding you have accidentally stumbled on your guesthouse in Amsterdam after wandering the city’s streets in a stupor, to the grace offered by morphine and opium to the gravely injured, to an insight gleaned during a 12-step meeting: “I’d listened to people overwhelmed by the relief of confessing, blessed by the mercy of untold secrets told.” So…does that mean they reconnect or not? What a sophisticated trick, to create this particular form of suspense and intellectual pleasure.

“Like a favorite special in a beloved restaurant, Silber again serves her unique flavor of reading joy.”
.--Kirkus Reviews

“A story of love, tragedy, of paths diverging and intertwining, Mercy is human and moving, awful and beautiful.”
--LitHub

If you haven’t read Joan Silber yet, it’s really time to get started
--Boston Globe Review, Marion Winik

The author’s 10th book is a winning exploration of friendship and betrayal

In case you only read the first paragraph of this review, I’ll start with the takeaway: If you have never read Joan Silber, it is time you did. Silber has been a critical darling since she won the Hemingway/PEN prize in 1980 for her debut, “Household Words.” More recently, “Improvement” (2017) won both the National Book Critics Circle and PEN/Faulkner prizes. Despite these and other honors, Silber still flies somewhat under the radar. And yet the same readers who have made Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Strout, and Jennifer Egan household names would love her. If you are in this group, allow me to recommend “Mercy,” Silber’s 10th book of fiction, as a jumping-off point for her delightful oeuvre.

It could be that one of the things that’s so great about Silber’s work is also responsible for her cult status. Like its predecessors, “Mercy” is a novel-in-stories, a single fictional universe with a rotating cast of narrators, connected by threads of plot and meaning that unfold over the course of the book as they would in a novel. At the same time, the sections leap decades and continents to uniquely dazzling effect.

“Mercy” has six sections, one for each of its main characters. We meet three of them in the first story, which is narrated by Ivan, who looks back some 50 years to his misspent youth in New York City of the 1970s when asked by his college-age daughter what’s the worst thing he’s ever done. “Lying to your mom about liking her kale salad,” he tells her.

But to us, the reader, he will tell the real story. This tone of intimate confiding runs all through the book: Every narrator will share the truth about things they hide from other people, reminiscing about their past adventures and misadventures in a conversational tone that really feels like you are being directly addressed — like a late-night phone call from an old friend, is how the critic Ron Charles so aptly put it.

Ivan’s story is a drug-a-logue of a type we haven’t run into in a while, since back in the days of “Permanent Midnight” and Edward St. Aubyn. The worst thing he ever did happened the night he and his best friend Eddie and Eddie’s girlfriend Ginger shot heroin, and Eddie overdosed. Ivan dragged him over to the emergency room of St. Vincent’s Hospital, but left him on his own in the waiting room, fearing that unpleasant consequences might unfold. And from there he just kept going, never finding out what happened to Eddie, even whether he lived or died, and never getting back in touch with Ginger, either, though he sees her on television years later.