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It has become a commonplace in recent years to lament the lack of emotional depth and variety of subject matter in contemporary American fiction. One of the catalysts for this discussion, and perhaps its most eloquent instance, was a now-famous essay by writer Tom Wolfe that appeared in Harper's magazine in 1989, entitled, "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast." After singling out the schools of metafiction and minimalism as the major sources of the problem, Wolfe resoundingly calls for a return to the realist novel of the nineteenth century with its epic scope of events and ideas, which in his view is exemplified by his own novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. Along the way, Wolfe approvingly cites Sinclair Lewis who, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "called on his fellow writers to give America 'a literature worthy of her vastness.' "
Wolfe rather narrowly assumes that such a return to the realistic novel entails using the "tools of journalism" to study the city, the seat of contemporary culture. But one might just as easily fulfill Wolfe's call by borrowing the tools of the historian to examine a rich and neglected vein of America's rural past. That is precisely what native Oklahoman Rilla Askew has done in her stunningly beautiful first novel, The Mercy Seat.
The story of the Lodi family's sudden and unexpected migration in 1887 from Kentucky into Indian Territory encompasses the social panorama of western settlement, the particularities of which Askew renders in as loving detail as Wolfe could hope for. We come to know the interiors of cabins, wagons, and small-town general stores; we hear the staccato rhythms of western dialect and read Christian Scripture in its Choctaw translation. There are the sensual intimations that some of us even now recollect from our rural origins: the smell of sawdust and houses "thick with the smell of meat and biscuits." Finally, and arrestingly, we come to know the making of guns in all their variety, for it is the illegal manufacture and sale of patented guns that has sent brothers Fayette and John Lodi and their families on their journey to Indian Territory, on the run from the law.
The Mercy Seat, therefore, bears the mark of careful historical investigation, the process of which Askew herself has discussed. The author of one previous work of fiction, a collection of short stories entitled Strange Business, Askew found the sources of her first novel in "old stories, handed down over generations, of how my family came into Indian Territory in the late 1800's" and began the process of writing by "ask[ing] questions of the few relatives still living who had listened to the old stories."
Ultimately, though, as in any great work of fiction, it is the novel's characters that matter most, not its historical verisimilitude. Mattie Lodi is the novel's chief narrator and the center of its moral universe. At the novel's opening, on the night of the family's flight from Kentucky, Mattie awakens to the sound of her mother crying and her father's demand, "Martha Ruth! … Get up and light the fire, would you! Mama's not feeling good." Thus, within the first two pages are established the relations that will prove to be the family's undoing: the genteel mother's grief at leaving her home, the father's tendency to depend on Mattie, whom he calls "Matt," like a son, and Mattie's unceasing, yet uncomprehending vigilance. From her child's perspective, the story of their leaving becomes nothing less than the classic narrative of expulsion, and their travel by wagon westward a mythic journey, underscored by prose that has been justly described as Faulknerian. Indeed, in its cadences and trajectory, Mattie's narration recalls the stream-of-consciousness journey of Thomas Sutpen's family in Absalom, Absalom!:
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