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Overview
An epic story that takes place on the dusty, remorseless Oklahoma frontier, where two brothers are deadlocked in a furious rivalry
Fayette is an enterprising schemer hoping to cash in on his brother's talents as a gunsmith. John, determined not to repeat the crime that forced both families to flee their Kentucky homes, doggedly follows his tenacious brother west, while he watches his own family disintegrate.
Wondrously told through the wary eyes of John's ten-year-old daughter, Mattie, whose gift of premonition proves to be both a blessing and a curse, The Mercy Seat resounds with the rhythms of the Old Testament even as it explores the mysteries of the Native American spirit world. Sharing Faulkner's understanding of the inescapable pull of family and history, and Cormac McCarthy's appreciation of the stark beauty of the American wilderness, Rilla Askew imbues this momentous work with her tremendous energy and emotional range. It is an extraordinary novel from a prodigious talent.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780140265156 |
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Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 05/01/1998 |
Pages: | 448 |
Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 7.98(h) x 1.00(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
What People are Saying About This
"Every once in a while a novel comes along which grips you with intensity, its texture and poetic language. Such novels sweep one into the pain and suffering of the characters, and as you read you feel you're actually living the story. The Mercy Seat is such a novel. It's a testament to human spirit, and it will endure."
Reading Group Guide
INTRODUCTION
In a Land Without Mercy
Against the background of the American Civil War, slavery, Indian removal, manifest destiny, outlaw legends, and the ordinary, everyday rigors of frontier life unfolds a story of two brothers. John Lodi is quiet and honest, dedicated to and gifted at his blacksmith's craft, while his brother Lafayette is loquacious and shrewd, harboring a penchant for bootlegged liquor, underhanded deals, and illegal guns. As different as they are, these two men and their families are knotted together by blood, a knot inevitably to be dissolved by blood. The Lodi clan rattles out of Kentucky one foggy midnight to escape retribution for breaking a gun patent, heading for the lawless Indian Territory destined to become Oklahoma. The abandonment of home and kin, and the journey itself, seems to take more of a toll on John's family, the worst loss being the death of John's wife. Numbly grieving, tattered, and sick with red fever, John Lodi and his children do not catch up to Lafayette in Indian Territory until six months later. In this new land, forcibly relocated Native Americans, freed slaves, and hard, circumspect white men form a community riddled with suspicion, dislike, and, at times, violence. The impossibility of resolving conflicts between cultures is emphasized by the irreparably discordant relationship of the Lodi brothers, between whom there is never a moment's understanding or harmony.
John's eldest child, a girl called Mattie, has inherited her mother's relentless will, as well as urgent&—if mysterious&—mission that she believes will save her family and deliver them safely back home to Kentucky. Her child's perception deepens and broadens and we see that a mystical gift of vision sets Mattie apart from her brothers and sisters. Awash with painful memories that belong to a liberated slave-woman, Mattie struggles against her own compassion to maintain the racial enmity she feels is necessary to safequard her family from the woman's alien influence. Another time, sitting amidst the ash and dust of her family's destroyed possessions, Mattie relives the deaths and thwarted desires of her ancestors. Yet with her pragmatic pioneer's mind and will, Mattie rejects her spiritual gift of sensitivity with all her might. For here, in this American wilderness, we are shown in the strained misunderstanding between brothers and strangers, family members and members of different cultures, there can exist no sympathy, no compassion, and indeed, no mercy. Caught between the violence of human will and the capriciousness of Fate, with both longing and antipathy in their hearts, these characters refuse to become what nature, or their Creator, intended them to be and their legacy transforms their country utterly.
ABOUT RILLA ASKEW
Both of Rilla Askew's novels to date, Strange Business (1992) and The Mercy Seat (1997), are situated in her home state of Oklahoma. She was born in the foothills of the Sans Bois Mountains in 1951, a fifth generation citizen of her state. The western landscape and history that is a part of Askew's heritage lives on in her imagination and her work. The Mercy Seat is based on Askew's own family's relocation from Kentucky, and many incidents materialize into fiction from a distant past that was kept alive through family stories. Askew's deep connection to her surroundings is evident everywhere in her work. In The Mercy Seat, she says, "This country. Oklahoma. The very sound of it is home."
Askew originally moved to New York to become an actress, but turned instead to writing plays and fiction. Critical and popular response to her work was immediate and overwhelmingly positive, her first book winning the Oklahoma Book Award. The Mercy Seat was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner award for fiction, the Oklahoma Book Award, and the Mountains and Plains Award for fiction, and won the Western Heritage award for best novel of 1997. Askew now moves back and forth between the southern Catskills and the Sans Bois Mountains of Oklahoma.
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