The Heaven of Mercury: A Novel

by Brad Watson

Overview

A National Book Award Finalist

Brad Watson's first novel was eagerly awaited after his breathtaking, award-winning debut collection of short stories, Last Days of the Dog-Men. In The Heaven of Mercury, Watson fulfills that literary promise with a humorous and jaundiced eye. Finus Bates has loved Birdie Wells since the day he saw her do a naked cartwheel in the woods in 1916. Later he won her at poker, lost her, then nearly won her again after the mysterious poisoning of her womanizing husband. Does Vish, the old medicine woman down in the ravine, hold the key to Birdie's elusive character? Or does Parnell, the town undertaker, whose unspeakable desires bring lust for life and death together? Or does the secret lie with some other colorful old-timer in Mercury, Mississippi, not such a small town anymore? With "graceful, patient, insightful and hilarious" prose (USA Today), Brad Watson chronicles Finus's steadfast devotion and Mercury's evolution from a sleepy backwater to a small city.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393324655
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/17/2003
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Brad Watson was the National Book Award shortlisted author of Last Days of the Dog–Men, The Heaven of Mercury, and Miss Jane. Originally from Mississippi, at the time of his death he was a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Wyoming.

Hometown:

Wyoming

Date of Birth:

July 24, 1955

Place of Birth:

Meridian, Mississippi

Education:

Meridian Junior College; B.A., Mississippi State University, 1978; M.F.A., University of Alabama, 1985

Table of Contents

I.
	Finus ex Machina	15
	Cephalantus Accidentalis	22
	Self-Reliance	26
	Giddyup	37
	Aunt Vish	44
	Birdicus Urquhartimus	51
	The Dead Girl	59
	Finus Connubialis	72
	Negro Electric	88
	Discussion with the Dummy	96
	A Tree Spirit	101
	Woodpile	109
	Wisdom	126
	Blood	135
	Habeas Corpus	148
	Black Heart	153
	Finus Inquisitus	161
	Obits	176
II.
	Her Remembrance of Awakened Birds	185
	Finus Querulous	197
	Finus Uxorious	206
	Saviors	218
	Selena in Ecstasy	228
	Finus Homerus	237
	Through the Mockingbird	252
	Finus Melonius (the Ratio of Love)	264
	Finus Impithicus	276
	Finus Magnificus	286
III.
	A Pair of Boots	293
	Finus Resurrectus	303
	A Lost Paradise	313
	Grievous Oscar	322
	Finus Infinitus	327

Editorial Reviews

"[Watson's] work may remind readers of William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, or Flanner O'Connor, but has a power—and a charm—all its own."

Baltimore Sun - Merle Rubin

"[A] superb novel, graced with lush and exciting prose in the Southern high rhetorical tradition."

Raleigh News and Observer

"Gimcrack storytelling...grounded by generous humanity."

Entertainment Weekly

"A fast-paced, myth-echoing, tragic-comic commentary on our modern lives."

Bookpage

"An intensity reminiscent of Faulkner, a bleak humor that recalls Flannery O’Connor, a whimsy inspired by Eudora Welty and a spontaneity suggesting prime Barry Hanna… Reading The Heaven of Mercury certainly restores one’s faith in Southern literature’s ability to startle and surprise… the risks pay off with insightful observations, dynamic relationships and scenes that crackle with tension and possibility."

Memphis Commercial Appeal

"Vividly peopled, full of surprises, The Heaven of Mercury is a deeply satisfying novel."

Margot Livesey

"[A] lushly written novel of Deep Southern dream and landscape."

New York Times

"A vivid mythology of a small Southern town that moves to a strange, electrifying beat."

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"The best thing to come out of the South since A Confederacy of Dunces."

Gregory Rabassa

"Sort of a calm wail. Each page a deep pleasure. A book at life’s pace yet somehow without any of its tedium. Only the Irish geniuses wrote like this."

Barry Hannah

"As mythic and miraculous as Faulkner and Marquez. Amazingly original, and a sublime delight for the lucky readers who get their hands on it. A novel so fine you don’t want it to ever end."

Larry Brown

"Watson imbues his work with an elegance that sets it apart from the rest."

Boston Herald

"The Heaven of Mercury is a tragicomic story of missed opportunities and unjust necessities that wittily explores the souls of its highly colorful cast of characters. It is suffused with an almost savage lyricism that illumines every accurate detail and nuance of place and speech. The light this novel casts is so brilliant it makes even its own shadows luminous. Brad Watson has struck a fresh and thrilling note."

Fred Chappell

"Brad Watson has set his superb second novel in a small Mississippi city near the Gulf of Mexico. The heat, damp, whisky, bigotry and family skulduggery suggest juicy Southern Gothic. Although The Heaven of Mercury is born of that tradition, it transcends its parentage."

The Guardian

"Extraordinary…. Mixes whimsy and hard truth in a way that’s heartbreaking…. Pungently erotic, and as affectionate as it is acidic… a perfect modern southern gothic."

Los Angeles Times Book Review - Mark Rozzo

"Set in the fictional town of Mercury, Mississippi, The Heaven of Mercury offers us necrophilia, murder, a talking cat, strange goings-on with an excised human heart and a number of ghostly apparitions. Yet it encompasses far more than this; and what might have been mere gothic extravaganza becomes, in the hands of this gifted writer, a subtle and moving meditation on the themes of continuity and impermanence, love and loss."

Independent Whig.

"[A]n unforgettable story…The accidents, the disappointments, the corrections, and the secrets each life contains are woven into a deeply sympathetic portrait of small town life at its worst and best."

The Advocate

A honey-dipped tale about how an unrequited love affair -- nurtured for nearly a century -- affects the citizens of a backwoods Mississippi town, Brad Watson's first full-length novel expands the Southern Gothic style of his short stories (Last Days of the Dog Men) and presents an unforgettable community of vividly observed, deeply human characters.

The place is Mercury, Mississippi, the year is 1916 and down by the river on a hot, lazy day, Finus Bates spies a naked Birdie Wells doing a cartwheel under the shade of trees at a campsite. It's all he'll ever need to love Birdie his whole life, but Birdie will go on to marry a womanizing shoe salesman named Earl, and Finus will get shackled to a cold and unforgiving fish named Avis. Add the evil dreck of Earl's calculating family, the odd religion of the town undertaker, the secrets of a backwoods medicine woman and the simmering rage of a maid named Creasie, and you have the stuff of this thrillingly ambitious first novel. Both time and truth are slippery in this tale; several scenes are replayed more than once, from different perspectives, and many obvious end points are superceded by new and eerier retellings. But it is the style of this book that is bound to get the most attention—the way Watson does not merely invoke Faulkner and García Márquez, but seems at times to speak straight through them.

Beth Kephart

A seamless interweaving of narrative, remembrance, dreaming, and fantasy unifies a wealth of colorful tragicomic material-in a superb first novel by the Alabama storywriter (Last Days of the Dog-Men, 1996). Central protagonist Finus Bates is the octogenarian editor of his hometown newspaper, The Mercury Comet, and sometime radio personality-and, through the long years of an unhappy marriage and unmitigated grief over his only son's early death, the unfulfilled lover of Birdie Wells Urquhart, whom Finus has adored ever since he accidentally saw her naked many decades earlier. Watson sets their unaccomplished relationship within a roiling context that embraces such melodramatic local phenomena as the tomcatting prowess of Birdie's unfaithful husband Earl and his appalling father Junius; the stunted growth to manhood of Parnell Grimes, inheritor of both his father's funeral parlor and the persuasive rumor that the latter had prospered by "selling bodies and body parts to the Atomic Energy Commission"; and the secrets kept by Birdie's resentful black housemaid Creasie and the latter's spooky Aunt Vish, a healer and witch-woman whom Faulkner might have created. The Southern Gothic detail is both shuddery and deliciously absurd, but the real strength of the novel lies in its flexible structure, which allows us to overhear details of Mercury's overheated history as pieced together by several involved observers, and in Watson's delicate comprehension of the subtle gradations of aging and change as the years pass, Mercury's people settle into the grooves life seems to have reserved for them, and the boundaries separating black from white, humans from animals, the living from the dead, appear toblur and dissolve. Finus and Birdie are marvelous creations, and Watson surrounds them with such agreeable grotesques as Parnell Grimes's death-obsessed soulmate Selena Oswald and Mercury's unofficial intellectual elder, morose, moribund Euple Scarbrough. Southern storytelling is alive and well in Watson's capable hands. An excellent debut.

Kirkus Reviews