BookBrowse Reviews Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh

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Mercy Street offers a timely discussion of the importance of abortion remaining a legal option.

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Jennifer Haigh's Mercy Street centers around a Boston clinic that provides abortion services. The lives of four people intersect as pro-choice and anti-abortion supporters face off during a particularly bleak Massachusetts winter in 2015.

Claudia is an administrator at Mercy Street, a women's clinic that offers not only abortion services but also support for other health care issues: providing birth control, running STD panels and performing annual health screenings. It's also the target of daily protests held at its front door. To ease the incredible stress she's under, Claudia smokes marijuana, which she purchases from Timmy, a tattooed, hirsute dealer who sells the drug out of his home (recreational marijuana use wasn't legal in the state until 2016). Anthony, an individual struggling with cognitive issues due to a workplace accident, also buys his drugs from Timmy. In his spare time, he stalks the Mercy Street clinic, joining the protests and taking pictures of women coming and going, which he sends to his friend Vincent. Vincent, a passionate supporter of anti-abortion issues, then posts the pictures on a website he calls the "Wall of Shame." He becomes obsessed with Claudia, setting the stage for a potential confrontation at the clinic.

The novel has many excellent qualities, first and foremost of which is Haigh's ability to create truly three-dimensional characters. Much of the narrative lays out how each developed into the person we meet at the book's outset. None of them had a happy childhood, and they've all become flawed adults. But what makes the characters outstanding is not only their depth, but their ability to change and grow over the course of the novel.

I also enjoyed the author's attention to the book's setting. Boston in winter is a cold, dreary, gray place, and in her skilled hands, the location becomes a character in its own right. Reading her words, you can feel the biting cold as you imagine yourself trudging through packed snow and slipping on ice-encrusted steps. The quality of Haigh's writing is stellar, start to finish, and never disappoints.

Perhaps the most important feature of the novel, though, is the portrayal of the clinic, particularly the women who work there and those who seek its help. Haigh offers a multi-faceted view that emphasizes the many reasons someone might seek an abortion (see Beyond the Book), and how important it is for individuals to have accurate information and access to medical services. It's a complex issue, and the author goes a long way toward helping her audience understand its nuances.

Unfortunately, I feel there are also a couple of major problems with the book. It's decidedly pro-choice, and while there's nothing wrong with that, all the men who are anti-abortion (and they're all men) are portrayed as brain-damaged or extreme-right white supremacist conspiracy theorists. The author missed an opportunity to have a rational debate about abortion rights — depicting anti-abortionists as exclusively male and completely irrational paints with entirely too broad a brush. I'd expect a writer so otherwise adept at subtlety to have written a narrative that was a little more nuanced.

The other issue is that the plot goes nowhere. Haigh takes great pains to build a tense situation and then allows it to simply fizzle (I envision a powder keg packed with explosives, only to have the fuse sputter out just before detonation). The book comes to an unsatisfying conclusion with no resolution to any of the characters' storylines.

Still, I enjoyed Mercy Street, and from a character development and stylistic standpoint it would be a five-star book for me. However, its simplistic approach to a complicated issue, along with a disappointing denouement, brings it down to a four. I'd recommend it to those who enjoy first-class writing and beautifully fleshed-out characters, but the difficulties mentioned above mean it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in June 2022, and has been updated for the February 2023 edition. Click here to go to this issue.