Review: “Mercy Street” may be the last novel about abortion before Roe v. Wade is dismantled
,” her sensitive novel about a Catholic priest and his family caught in the sexual abuse scandal. The church appears again in this new story but only to hover along the periphery. This time, Haigh is more interested in the plight of severely isolated people.At the center of “Mercy Street” is Claudia, an experienced counselor at a reproductive health clinic in downtown Boston. The protocols of working in a building surrounded by potentially violent activists have grown routine for Claudia.
Haigh seems well aware of the heavy curtain that’s been drawn across these services. Much of her novel is devoted to demystifying this quotidian work. She lets us listen in as Claudia answers the hotline, responding patiently to the same questions over and over again, starting with “How much does it cost?” We also see a range of people brave the phalanx of protesters and come to the clinic. For some young women, an abortion is simply a brief pause in a life pointed toward success.
Haigh bears down on the hypocrisy of so-called “pro-life” conservatives. Nothing irritates Claudia more than the extraordinary concern that daily protesters shower on poor women until the very moment they give birth — at which time the wholly unprepared new mother is simply an irritating freeloader for American capitalists to condemn or ignore. “The bleak struggle of her life — the stark daily realities that made motherhood impossible — didn’t trouble them at all,” Claudia thinks.
While rotating from Claudia at the clinic to the pro-life activists conspiring on the Internet, Haigh gradually choreographs the sort of confrontation we’ve come to expect and fear at the far end of the abortion controversy. In the end, though, “Mercy Street” avoids any such climactic melodrama and stays true to its fundamental decency.
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