In “Mercy Street,” Haigh has created a world that revolves on an axis of random yet consequential events, a novel of smaller moments that only later seem significant. Timmy is a weed dealer whose life intersects with the others in progressively surprising ways. Raised in a hardscrabble Maine town by a single mother (like “many poor people, she’d been raised by a teenager”), she often sees her mother in the younger clients, the pregnant girls “half-educated, without resources.”Īnthony and Victor are bumbling, menacing foot soldiers on the fringe of the anti-abortion movement. (The clinic’s official name is Women’s Options Bostonians just call it Mercy Street.) At 43, Claudia is most happy in relationships with men who want as much space as she does. Jennifer Haigh (Courtesy Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)Ĭlaudia works at Mercy Street, a women’s health clinic near Boston Common, where she manages hotline volunteers and does in-person informational counseling. This is a novel that feels created with a fine, small-size gauge: the four main characters are not national leaders or even people who wield a fraction of that power. To do this, Haigh chronicles some pivotal events in the lives of people on both sides of the abortion issue. Set in Boston in the winter and spring of 2015, “Mercy Street” offers a complex portrayal of the many ways a woman arrives at her decision to continue or terminate her pregnancy, while also capturing the broader political and cultural tumult that preceded the 2016 presidential campaign. “Mercy Street” joins other novels that, in recent years, have examined this topic from different viewpoints, such as Joyce Carol Oates’ philosophical “A Book of American Martyrs,” Leni Zumas’ dystopian “Red Clocks” and Brit Bennett’s nuanced “The Mothers.” 1), is about the charged and - given the recent state and Supreme Court rulings - very timely issue of abortion. Her previous novel, “ Heat and Light,” about the ruinous effects of fracking on a rural Pennsylvania town, was not only well-researched, it contained multifaceted characters and storylines, qualities that landed it on numerous Best Books of 2016 lists.

This is not the case with Jennifer Haigh’s fiction. When a novelist takes on a big, divisive issue, there’s a risk that the result will read like a polemic.

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