The Mercy Rule: A Novel | Perri Klass

The Mercy Rule: A Novel | Perri Klass | spending time

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The Mercy Rule: A ...

	The Mercy Rule: A Novel Perri Klass Houghton Mifflin, 2008 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

At first glance, Dr. Lucy Weiss looks like the typical high-achieving, upper-middle-class working mother who, along with her husband, is bringing up much-beloved children in a world of Saturday morning soccer, private-school teacher conferences, and hyperaggressive classroom mommies. But Lucy's own history makes her an anomaly. Having overcome a difficult childhood in foster care, she is what's called a super-survivor, a kid who grew up in the margins. Now a pediatrician, Lucy finds herself working with some of these same at-risk patients and their families.
The Mercy Rule is a novel about the all-important job of taking care of children. Lucy's work takes her back into the world of families living on the edge, where every day she must decide whether parents' actions are so incompetent?or so flaky?that their children are in danger. It's her job to make the call and to step in when she has to. As she moves between her disparate worlds?from worrying about her own brilliant but odd son being labeled with a diagnosis to worrying about parents struggling with drugs and impossible living situations?Lucy must judge herself as a parent, critique other parents, and also deal with the echoes of her childhood.
Watching Lucy try to keep the balance, enjoy her own children, and look at other families with humor and justice and mercy, readers will understand why Chris Bohjalian said of Perri Klass, "Few writers write as beautifully or as authentically about parenting."

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Excellent!

Klass has created an unbelievably realistic portrait of a privileged family struggling to maintain its heart in the face of pressures from work and elite school and each other. Klass has a knack for writing with wry humor and great compassion, a rare combination, indeed!

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I've been a long-time fan of Perri Klass and I'll read anything she writes. It's not about the genre or plot or even the characters. It's about Klass's unique writing style, a style that makes you feel you're having an intimate conversation with the author. Indeed, sometimes Ms. Klass talks directly to her readers, challenging us to ask questions.

Each chapter of Mercy Rule reads like a short story -- not surprising, since Klass excels at the story form. I have to admit I kept looking for a plot, or at least a story arc. To be honest, I wanted another book like The Mystery of Breathing. I wanted to see characters changed by event and experiences. Instead, each story feels more like spending time with Lucy as she experiences the different parts of her life: an academic presentation, obligatory parent-teacher conferences, home with the husband, working with difficult cases. We get a sense of a fully lived life but it's not clear what (if anything) we are supposed to take away.

Being an inveterate analyzer, I admit I tried to understand the broader implications of the title. I hadn't known about the Mercy Rule -- the idea that when one team has outscored another to the point where it's ridiculous, the game ends. Perhaps Klass wants to suggest that it's time to invoke the Mercy Rule when dealing with difficult cases, like the confused Delia who is clearly an unfit mother. But if there's a connection, I can't see it.

The very last chapter (really a short story that gives the book its title) was the most satisfying. Lucy's "strange" child, Freddie, is the only boy left out of a class trip to the Red Sox game. The situation gets resolved in a particularly satisfying way. It's almost as though someone said, "Enough points against Freddie! Let's stop the game."

Like other reviewers, I was frustrated with the more open-ended plot lines, such as the mother who is accused of child abuse. I didn't really understand the interlude with Theodore, the precocious boy Lucy befriends on the plane. I was happy to see Lucy hope her son will avoid a fateful diagnosis -- he's just eccentric and bright, she says.

So why a five-star review? Well, to be honest, I had trouble putting down this book. I read it awhile back and thought I had reviewed it. When I picked up the book to write the review, I had to to force myself to stop reading. Klass's prose is compelling. Her vignettes may not lead to a plot, or even to an "aha" sense of meaning, but each one is like overhearing a conversation on a bus or watching a car wreck. You're drawn in to the scene.

And when I see that Perri Klass has written another book, I'll get on the list. She might not deliver what I'm expecting, but she won't disappoint me.

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Lucy Weiss, as rendered by Perri Klass, is a heroine for our post-feminist modern age.

Dr. Lucy Weiss is funny, fierce, talented and has a certain chip on her shoulder when it comes to the rich and powerful. Whether it's the lunatic stockbroker forcing his son to play team sports so that he'll be attuned to "social baseball" when he gets older, or the wealthy mom who thinks she can bend the truth about her situation at home so that Lucy would appear at a custody hearing for her, there are plenty of self-serving louts who deserve Lucy's loathing. However, the steady stream of delinquent and ditzy patients who march through her office each day don't make a case for "Parent of the Year." And, if we want to be fair about it, Lucy's own blunders with her children and husband certainly don't qualify her for any auspicious awards, either.

THE MERCY RULE, real-life pediatrician/writer Perri Klass's latest novel, is a heartfelt paen to everyone who has ever borne offspring, adopted children or just hoped to give another generation a chance that their own wasn't offered.

Having a gifted son with undiagnosed issues (she never goes into what their legion of doctors had determined about young Freddy's uniqueness) and a prepubescent daughter just scaling the mountains of social issues that face American girls, the good doctor is up to her armpits in the dirty business of complicated and conditional love. Her husband Greg is a nice guy, a college professor who, we later learn, has improprieties of his own to handle and for which to beg her forgiveness. Lucy is a foster child, and a lucky one at that. Having survived by virtue of a kind and loving teacher who adopted her in grade school, she has decided to give back to all those kids who may not be as lucky as her.

So her practice includes a specialty in the care and, well, "fostering" of foster children. Several of her patients are repeat customers, and Lucy shows the same concern and love for them that she shows her own kids, their friends and even the young boy who is seated next to her on a fateful plane trip to a speaking engagement in California. Klass gives Lucy intelligence, wit, forthrightness and the concerns of the modern-day mother, but also saddles her with some unresolved story issues that are strangely left unhinged.

When Lucy finds out that her husband cheated on her, it's a three-sentence reaction. However, later, we find out the extent to which he cheated on her --- the number of times and the intensity with which he did --- and this leaves the reader unsure about their relationship and about Lucy's ability to guide her family through difficult times. When she is supposed to be taking a day with her daughter and ends up spending it, Isabel in tow, rushing to the aid of an off-kilter patient with too many kids and a new pregnancy she doesn't have the money or wherewithal to deal with properly, it feels like Lucy is trying to make the rest of the world safer than the one at home. Does she care more about these youngsters who may end up in bad foster care than about her own offspring?

Certainly there is a push-and-pull between these issues in her heart and soul, and many scenes in the book exemplify her split personality, her attempts to balance out both work and home issues with love and fairness. Lucy doesn't always succeed, but we have to give her props for trying. And sometimes Lucy's detestment of those with serious money, which seems to be most of the families who attend the private school her children do, is childish and petty. Not everybody who is rich is bad, but somehow she hasn't learned this yet.

THE MERCY RULE proffers, for the most part, enlightened and funny aspects of the daily life of work and kids and what love has REALLY got to do with it --- which is plenty. Striving for imperfection, Lucy Weiss, as rendered by Perri Klass, is a heroine for our post-feminist modern age.

--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano

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Interesting read...from a teacher's perspective

It's rare that a work of fiction resonates with me as an apt exploration of the dichotomy of child welfare and development across class barriers...in a really witty, entertaining way.

"The Mercy Rule" is written by Perri Klass, a pediatrician and medical director for the national literacy program Reach Out and Read. She's a woman who has obviously seen it all and writes from an amazingly authentic place.

Lucy, the main character in the story (and also a pediatrician), constantly grapples with the question of what's normal and appropriate for children as she straddles the two socio-economic worlds she must navigate on a daily basis. Here's one of Lucy's ponderings on her six-year-old son who demonstrates compulsive and socially awkward behaviors which isolate him from the upper-class society their family reluctantly identifies with:

"And sooner or later, some teacher will want him tested again, and someone will formulate Freddy. He will have a diagnosis: Lucy doesn't believe that he will make it through school without one. And she can't quite explain why she wants to hold out as long as possible in this complicated world where as far as Freddy knows, he defines the boundaries of normal, and everyone else is off kilter."

And Lucy's witty observations of the at-risk kids and pregnant-for-the tenth-time moms she examines for the state:

"But where is it written, tell me, that we must coddle the clueless? Clothe the naked, okay, feed the hungry, you got it. But where is it written that a mother who cannot do what every stray cat can do--lick 'em clean, feed 'em till they're full, keep 'em in a safe place, and snarl at intruders--needs a therapist and a residential substance abuse program and some respite babysitting when she comes out? As far as I'm concerned, if you need regular supervised urine tests to show that you aren't too bombed out of your mind to hold the baby, you lose the baby. You're a loser and you lose."

If you like action, be warned: the book is character-driven, not plot driven, and there are many diversions along the way. But I found "The Mercy Rule" to be a compelling read about loving and caring for children from another 'mandated reporter's' point of view.

(From http://www.TheCornerstoneForTeachers.blogspot.com)

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reviews: page 1, 2

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