Customer Reviews

The Mercy Rule

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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

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.

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)

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!

But that's okay. Klass's novels are character-driven, rather than plot-driven, and in this book, she has created a family of interesting, quirky personalities. Along the way, in the story, we meet other families or parts of families. Some are "good" parents and some, like the mother of a 10th(!) baby who has had her other nine children taken from her by Family Services, ain't too good in the parenting department.

Klass, a doctor-and-writer-and-mother (though I'm not sure about "wife") usually manages to combine her three identities in interesting novels. This is another one in her long line.

A lucid and aborbing book about what it means it be a good parent. Protagnist is a doctor who works with "at risk" families, is a wife and mother herself, and was "rescued" from foster care as a child by a caring teacher who adopted her. So this book comes at the issue of what constitutes good parenting from many different angles. The plot, such as it is, stops and starts and secondary characters are introduced and then vanish without clear resolution. And the point of view shifts from first to third person almost randomly. But the writing is good and all of situations and characters are utterly believable and I couldn't put it down. If you are a parent yourself, you'll enjoy the relationship between the protagonist and her two kids.

I'm thinking now as I think about this book that perhaps the very odd structure, lack of plot and a few other oddities are done on purpose here. This is a very interesting book---it tells, among a lot of other stories, about a boy named Freddy, who to this reader anyway is obviously someone that would be diagnosed as having Aspergers Syndrome or high functioning autism, but very tellingly, these words are never, ever mentioned in the book. This going along with another book by Klass, called Quirky Kids, which advocates not overly diagnosing these syndromes and just taking each kid as they come. Which is something I do agree with to a point. In fact, almost every character in this book could fit into some kind of diagnosis----OCD, eating disorders, personality disorders, etc---and this never really becomes the focus of the book---and this was well done.

I would give this book 5 stars if I just based stars on my enjoyment of a book. I raced through this, and liked most every minute. However, in some ways, this can't even really be called a novel. There is no plot at all to speak of---just moments in the life of the featured family---a doctor mother, a professor father and Isabel and Freddy, their children. The mother works closely with DSS and is involved in many foster families, and she herself was a foster child for a while. There are many little stories here---families involved with DSS, the fate of some we never really learn, glimpses of the childrens' private school, which like so many private schools I read about makes me wonder WHY in the world the family is wasting that much money on---just to avoid their kids being with the ordinary people, which does not fit at all with the family portroyed here?---vacations the family takes, a small sub-plot about a brief affair the father had---and really a lot more. There are at least 3 different narrators, and switches all over between 1st and 3rd person. This sort of works here, but not completely.

Overall I would certainly recommend this book. I think it would be most enjoyed by people raising school age kids with some quirks, struggling with how to deal with this, and by those with an interest in the foster care system. I like Perri Klass' writing style---I've read almost everything she's written---but I think this could have been an even better book with just a little more structure and restraint.

Although I managed to finish this novel, I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did. Klass seems to be leading the reader somewhere and yet never gets there.

I just finished reading The Mercy Rule and I have to admit that it just wasn't very good. While certainly humorous in spots, that is perhaps the only positive statement I can make about this novel. The characters lacked depth - I found it hard to identify with anyone at all in the book. Many times I was left with the vague notion that the characters (or perhaps even the author herself) subscribed to quite a few stereotypes regarding people from different backgrounds. The prose was nothing special, certainly not a book that I would describe as being "beautifully written". And in fact, there are many places throughout the story where the narrative diverges wildly onto a completely unrelated segue, which leaves the reader feeling disoriented and slightly annoyed. It removes you from the experience and makes it nearly impossible to get "lost" in the story. Speaking of the story, it was anti-climactic and lacked substance. Even now after finishing the entire novel I would be hard pressed to say that it was actually ABOUT anything at all. The entire novel is written in the third person with the exception of Chapter 2, which oddly and disconcertingly shifts to first person. I found that to be totally disorienting, as it never happens again throughout the rest of the book; and I couldn't really see the purpose behind it happening in that chapter in the first place. Overall, this novel just didn't have much cohesiveness; it was not well-written, and I felt an extreme sense of let-down when I completed it. If not for my own dogged need for closure, I probably would not have trudged on to finish this book at all.