The Heaven Of Mercury

Rating:
Summary: Subtle storytelling, gorgeous prose
Review: Many of the negative reviews here seem focused on the disjointed narrative or - unbelievably - a supposed lack of plot. Perhaps those readers would be better served by the latest Patricia Cornwell novel, complete with inciting incident, rising action, climax, etc., all told in linear fashion, each event telegraphed to the reader by the event before it. I don't doubt that these same readers struggled through "plotless" books like The Sound and the Fury or Joseph Heller's Something Happened.

Watson is a subtle storyteller who reveals the truth about his characters through a few well-chosen stories from their lives, each rendered in pitch-perfect prose. He does not feel compelled to give us a summation of each character's entire life history, nor does he show us the entire internal world of every person in the book, and for that he is beaten up by readers who apparently are unfamiliar with Hemingway's iceberg principle.
As to the charge that the relationship between a black housemaid and her employer was drawn without subtlety, nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, this was one of the most nuanced and deeply-felt examples of human connection (or lack thereof) in the novel.
Most of the readers who lambasted the story in the novel at least gave Watson credit for his brilliant writing style, so I won't add anything there.
If you treasure southern literature, stories of abiding love, or ruminations on life, death and the hereafter, order this book now.

Rating:
Summary: Now Listen Up
Review: This is one of the most beautiful books I've read in ages. Based on some of the reviews below, this is definitely a love it or hate it book. I'll tell you this much: if you love good fiction with pitch-perfect prose and dead-on dialogue, then this is the novel for you. Everyone says it reminds them of Faulkner or Marquez but this is completely original writing that gets to the meat of the human heart (no pun intended, as a human heart is actually a pivotal plot point). If you like formulaic writing and stitled dialogue this is not the book for you. You should read books like this, though. They're good for you. One of the best books of the year, if not THE best.

Rating:
Summary: If this is heaven, give me hell
Review: What do you say about a book whose crowning literary moment is the description of an 89-year-old man taking a dump in the bathroom? Then there's this lovely image of a horse: "A long, slow fart flabbered from the proud black lips of Dan's hole, and the smoke from it too trailed off in the air." Curiously, intellectuals praise The Heaven of Mercury for how it "illumines every accurate detail" and delivers "just-right words."

The Heaven of Mercury is part love story, part murder mystery, and part taste of the South. These parts combine into a dull and dreary text. The love story offers no payoff to the reader. The murder mystery fails outright. It is so loosely developed, there are no clues for the reader to pick up. In the end the omniscient narrator just tells some back story to explain the mystery. As for the taste of the South, it is bland at best.

The Heaven of Mercury does make a solid showing as a feminist text. In this book the men are weak, the women are strong.

Finally, The Heaven of Mercury is yet another example of how the academic mind disdains plot. Here the story is not told in a linear fashion. A character who dies in one chapter may be alive in the next. This book of 333 pages piddles along to a dubious crescendo (the bathroom scene) near page 200, then for the next 133 pages the author fills in gaps left by the first 200 pages.