Review: ‘Mercury’

Our loved ones can become our blind spots - especially if we turn our gaze inward in times of trouble or passion. Margot Livesey, a professor of fiction in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, introduces us to a husband and wife who can't quite see each other while he is in the grips of grief and she is dreaming of glory.

'Mercury” is the story of Donald and Viv. He's an optometrist whose father has recently died. She works at a horse stable where a marvelous new horse - the Mercury of the title - has arrived to reawaken her hopes of becoming a champion rider. Donald narrates the first and last portion of the book, while Viv speaks for herself in the middle section.

As the book unfolds, a series of small bad decisions, some made by each protagonist, results in a shared crisis that threatens their marriage and their most important friendships. The nature of blindness, both literal and figurative, is an important theme in the book, and Livesey harnesses it to powerful effect.

The book is also a critique of the notion of guns as an effective hedge against dangers real and imagined. Livesey isn't particularly subtle in offering her assessment - at one point, the text of the Second Amendment is shoehorned into the narrative for the narrator's consideration - but the key moments in her plot still flow naturally and with a certain inevitability.

Donald and Viv struggle mightily to avoid seeing what they don't want to see. But the novel's moments of truth, when the characters must see things for what they are, shine a bright light on mistakes made and opportunities lost.