Photo by Shari Diamond
Joan Silber is the author of the new novel Mercy. Her other books include the novel Improvement. She lives in New York.
Q: What inspired you to write Mercy, and how did you create your character Ivan?
A: Mercy seems to have had a few sources. As a New Yorker, I’ve always heard of hospitals dealing with overdosed drug users left on their steps, and I’ve wondered about the intricacies of those abandonments.
And on two occasions, male friends with college-age daughters were speaking of their daughters’ accusations (like Greta Thunberg’s) of slipshod values in the generation before. I had the idea of a daughter asking a parent, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” and the answer I imagined was my first chapter.
I didn’t want Ivan, who leaves his friend in danger, to be a villain. And it was always important to me that his regretted act remains a secret, told to no one, ever. I had to imagine the jagged way he moves from the denials inherent in addiction to a relatively decent life with a great gap in it.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Ivan and Eddie?
A: Ivan and Eddie are really friends. In their early 20s, they love the adventures they have together, the “elsewhere” they seek together.
Ivan is a little rasher, and Eddie is always more social and charming, does better with women. Ivan never stops mourning the loss of the friendship. And had the heroin they bought that night been weaker, they might’ve stayed friends for a lifetime.
Q: What do you think the novel says about human connections?
A: As in other books of mine, the story becomes a web of different tellers. (I feel I’ve done my best work in this form).
In the emergency room, a smart 10-year-old girl in 1974 sees Eddie’s desertion by Ivan, and there’s a constellation of characters linked to her, in later chapters. I’m ever interested in the irony and beauty of those links, the inadvertent ties and the long consequences.
Q: Did you know how the story would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I really did not know how the novel would end. I did have some idea that I wanted Eddie’s fate to remain a mystery until the final chapter, and I wanted there to be some degree of suspense in this.
And as I got to know the characters, I was interested in their underground shifts of regret over time, ways they see all too well that “there’s not enough mercy in this world.”
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I just finished writing a short story that has to do with the settlements of Jewish people in China—that is, the Ashkenazi Jews who fled to Chinese cities in the first half of the 20th century—though the story itself takes place later.
I hope this can become part of a longer book, with other components. In our own era of continuing political menace, I’m interested in fiction where characters carry the weight of history.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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