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The Mercy Seat
Few first novels garner the kind of powerful praise awarded this 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 new talent.
Strange Business, a collection of linked stories that won the 1993 Oklahoma Book Award, is available from Penguin.
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 new talent.
Strange Business, a collection of linked stories that won the 1993 Oklahoma Book Award, is available from Penguin.
448 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1997
15 people are currently reading
257 people want to read
About the author
Rilla Askew
14 books132 followersRilla Askew's newest novel, PRIZE FOR THE FIRE, is about the 16th century English martyr Anne Askew. Rilla Askew received a 2009 Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her first novel, THE MERCY SEAT, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dublin IMPAC Prize, was a Boston Globe Notable Book, and received the Oklahoma Book Award and the Western Heritage Award in 1998. Her acclaimed novel about the Tulsa Race Massacre, FIRE IN BEULAH, received the American Book Award and the Myers Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. She was a 2004 fellow at Civiella Ranieri in Umbertide, Italy, and in 2008 her novel HARPSONG received the Oklahoma Book Award, the Western Heritage Award, the WILLA Award from Women Writing the West, and the Violet Crown Award from the Writers League of Texas. Askew received the 2011 Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book. Her novel KIND OF KIN deals with state immigration laws and was a finalist for the Western Spur Award, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, and was long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC Prize. Her most recent book is a collection of creative nonfiction MOST AMERICAN: Notes From A Wounded Place. Kirkus Reviews calls Most American "An eloquently thoughtful memoir in essays." In nine linked works of creative nonfiction, Askew spotlights the complex history of her home state. From the Trail of Tears to the Tulsa Race Riot to the Murrah Federal Building bombing, Oklahoma appears as a microcosm of our national saga. Yet no matter our location, Askew argues, we must own the whole truth of our history if the wounds of division that separate us are ever to heal.
"Five generations of Rilla Askew's family have occupied southeastern Oklahoma. Celebrating this birthright, she has concocted of it her own Faulknerian kingdom. Askew is writing a mythic cycle, novels and stories that unsettle our view of the West's settling. In a continuous fictional mural populated with hardscrabble souls - credible, noble and flawed - Askew is completing the uncompleted crossing of the plains. Trusting prose that is disciplined, luxuriant and muscular, she is forging a chronicle as humane as it is elemental."
Allan Gurganus
May 20, 2009
American Academy of Arts and Letters
"Five generations of Rilla Askew's family have occupied southeastern Oklahoma. Celebrating this birthright, she has concocted of it her own Faulknerian kingdom. Askew is writing a mythic cycle, novels and stories that unsettle our view of the West's settling. In a continuous fictional mural populated with hardscrabble souls - credible, noble and flawed - Askew is completing the uncompleted crossing of the plains. Trusting prose that is disciplined, luxuriant and muscular, she is forging a chronicle as humane as it is elemental."
Allan Gurganus
May 20, 2009
American Academy of Arts and Letters
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
August 24, 2013
Brilliant, brutal, beautiful novel of the journey west,in the 1880s, of a desperate,haunted family from Kentucky,told largely thru the eyes of Mattie, a ten year old girl when the novel starts, and a powerful,embittered, prematurely aged Soul by journey's end, although this journey West doesn't cease with arrival.Her family,fractured by sickness and death,must continually adjust to the natural hardships of moving into a wild and unforgiving landscape. Askew's writing is achingly,sumptuously vivid,dragging the reader viscerally into the sights, smells, sounds, sensations of this stark world so that one inhabits the moments,along with the characters,with no distance between their lives and ours. This, one says to oneself, this is how it must have been,this beautiful, this cruel,this alive, to exist on the frontier.This journey is also the profoundly sorrowful saga of two brothers, locked in bondage to each other thru blood-love and rivalry,unable to walk away from the other,drawn in complicated orbit around each another by one's foolish pride and bad judgment and the other's loyalty; each is destined to be the undoing of the other and by the examples they set, to drag all their kin and community along with them. Intertwined with the Biblical Cain and Abel motif, is the story of the the Western land(Oklahoma,Indian Territory) itself and the root legends and beliefs of its Indian peoples,as well as the legacy of slavery and the unfinished pain of the Civil War.The characters are interconnected by Fate and choice; the author's philosophical and spiritual agenda is to make us think hard about what is God's will,the line between revenge and forgiveness,and how one's soul is saved or lost.There is a crackling good story in these pages and characters fully formed,authentic western voices, who will make you re-read and ponder their actions. This is a dense book, a deep book,multi-layered and at times elusive, and thus not for every taste. It reminds me of Faulkner or Thomas Wolfe, and if you see it through, it will not disappoint.
July 18, 2008
It was ok up until he middle of the story. Then it just all kinda fell apart for me. It described the comings and goings of the characters but with no ryme or reason. The second half of the book was just kinda pointless to me. I had to force my self to finish it.
November 10, 2007
At times brilliant and engaging, at other times dull and plodding. It had a somewhat spiritual undercurrent that didn't work for me, but may resonate with other readers who have similar leanings.
July 8, 2007
Rilla Askew's Mercy Seat is in the top five of my most favorite books. It's rich language just pulls you in and wraps around you like a warm, comforting blanket. If you like history, especially the West, you will enjoy the book as it chronicles the story of a family moving west from Arkansas to Oklahoma and what happens when they arrive. Even if you don't like history you will still enjoy the book because the characters are central to the story. I watched Ms. Askew do a book talk about this book at the University of Oklahoma many years ago and truly enjoyed listening to her discuss the book and her background. It's one of only a few books that I would actually read again.
June 24, 2012
I hated this book. I never want to give up once I pick something up to read... but I really had to battle my way through this. Even though the writing was skilled and the language tempting, the subject matter, the characters and the lack of a plot or any point to all the sadness just seemed not worth all the trouble.
November 29, 2012
This is one of the most depressing books I have ever read.
November 5, 2016
I have read other Rilla Askew books - Beulah Land being among the best books I've ever read. Her being an Oklahoma author and the settings being in Oklahoma are of interest to me as a native Oklahoman.
However, The Mercy Seat was sort of a dichotomy for me. The words were beautifully constructed and the book was presented in exquisite detail. Therein lied part of the problem for me.
The story line was about two brothers and their families in the late 1800s who had to leave Kentucky under suspicious circumstances and headed to what was then Indian Territory (later to become Oklahoma), and all that happened along the way and after resettling in southeastern Indian Territory. Interesting story line with lots of potential.
But, the characters were eccentric to a fault, each in different ways, and to me, none of them had any redeeming qualities to make the reader all that interested. They were just all weird individually, and in their interactions with one another - especially within their own families.
There was so much detail written that it detracted from the actual story. Eventually toward the end of the book, I was so ready to finish it that once the author started with the detail (which added little to the story) which I had learned by this point would last quite a number of pages, I just began skipping pages until the story picked up again. It sort of felt like the book that would never end.
I guess the most telling factor is that even though I wanted to get to the end to see what eventually happened, I was really glad when I finally reached the end!
However, The Mercy Seat was sort of a dichotomy for me. The words were beautifully constructed and the book was presented in exquisite detail. Therein lied part of the problem for me.
The story line was about two brothers and their families in the late 1800s who had to leave Kentucky under suspicious circumstances and headed to what was then Indian Territory (later to become Oklahoma), and all that happened along the way and after resettling in southeastern Indian Territory. Interesting story line with lots of potential.
But, the characters were eccentric to a fault, each in different ways, and to me, none of them had any redeeming qualities to make the reader all that interested. They were just all weird individually, and in their interactions with one another - especially within their own families.
There was so much detail written that it detracted from the actual story. Eventually toward the end of the book, I was so ready to finish it that once the author started with the detail (which added little to the story) which I had learned by this point would last quite a number of pages, I just began skipping pages until the story picked up again. It sort of felt like the book that would never end.
I guess the most telling factor is that even though I wanted to get to the end to see what eventually happened, I was really glad when I finally reached the end!
August 24, 2014
By reading this book, I have an entirely new view of the prairie and of its people.
The Lodi family moves to Oklahoma from Kentucky. They leave at a bad time -- weather is cold enough to freeze the chickens in their temporary coop, and the calf dies -- and they really have no ideas where they are going. There are 2 parents and 5 children, 1 an infant. In a very short amount of time, there is 1 parent and 4 children. From that point, the challenges continue: sickness, ignorance, grinding poverty, starvation, depression, history, outlaws…all are part of the life of the Lodi family.
This book is written in spirals. The plot is a spiral, where early incidents continue to define what happens later. Thoughts spiral and affect reality. Things spiral out of control, and they also spiral in predictable ways. Even Askew's scenes, characters, and sentences spiral: everything is met again and again, each time slightly differently, but each time in a new and surprising as way.
Like that last sentence.
In this family's life, the spiritual, geographical, social, and familial intermingle and echo one another. By the end, I understand how difficult my own forebears' lives must have been. I also celebrate the fact that my own family were prairie people 2, 3, and 4 generations ago. I suspect it made me strong, but I'm not sure that I have what it would take to survive.
The Lodi family moves to Oklahoma from Kentucky. They leave at a bad time -- weather is cold enough to freeze the chickens in their temporary coop, and the calf dies -- and they really have no ideas where they are going. There are 2 parents and 5 children, 1 an infant. In a very short amount of time, there is 1 parent and 4 children. From that point, the challenges continue: sickness, ignorance, grinding poverty, starvation, depression, history, outlaws…all are part of the life of the Lodi family.
This book is written in spirals. The plot is a spiral, where early incidents continue to define what happens later. Thoughts spiral and affect reality. Things spiral out of control, and they also spiral in predictable ways. Even Askew's scenes, characters, and sentences spiral: everything is met again and again, each time slightly differently, but each time in a new and surprising as way.
Like that last sentence.
In this family's life, the spiritual, geographical, social, and familial intermingle and echo one another. By the end, I understand how difficult my own forebears' lives must have been. I also celebrate the fact that my own family were prairie people 2, 3, and 4 generations ago. I suspect it made me strong, but I'm not sure that I have what it would take to survive.
January 5, 2015
What starts off as an eye-opening and descriptive portrayal of two families' traveling westward to flee consequences of choices made in their native land quickly becomes tedious and confusing. Paragraph-long sentences riddled with secondary and tertiary descriptions bog down the flow of the story, requiring the reader to have to reread a number of passages to full understand what had been conveyed. The narrative changes voices intermittently and quickly shuts out the inner dialogue of Mattie, the main character, who had offered the most interesting insights. While the climax and resolution of the plot will make you gasp, the events leading up to it may turn you away before you get there.
December 21, 2016
I feel disingenuinous clicking the little button next to "read," because I didn't even finish this. It was too easy to walk away from these unlikeable characters. I don't even wonder what happened to them.
September 22, 2013
Weird. The story goes around in circles. Plot points that drag on as important leave you disappointed. Voice changes and point of view are random and not smoothly used. I finished it, but not at all satisfying.
June 11, 2017
The prose is as poetic and lush as Rilla's work always is, but the first two sections of the book went rather slowly for me. They were almost TOO densely packed with lyricism. In the third section, though, the narrative really took off and I read straight through to the end.
September 1, 2009
I really liked this book. I found that I had to read it very slowly though which is unusual for me. It was well written and intriguing... a little on the dark side.
September 12, 2009
This book captured me from the very first and held me spell bound. I'll find her other work and read it as well.
January 21, 2010
Family flees Kentucky to settle in Oklahoma. Good descriptive writing by very depressing. Don't care about the people.
December 1, 2010
An interesting book but very very bleak.
November 15, 2014
A bit too long-winded for me.
April 4, 2015
Tried multiple times to read this book and couldn't finish it. Depressing and slow. May try again in the future.
March 4, 2016
I got sidetracked and could never really get back into the book, in spite of reading almost half of it.
April 15, 2020
The Lodi brothers move from Kentucky to Oklahoma as pioneers. Although they are brothers, they could not be more different. John, the younger, is a skilled blacksmith and gun maker, quiet and focused on his work and family. Fayette, or Fate, is a big talker, a man who always has a ton of ideas on how he can get rich regardless of the legality of the ideas. The journey is not their desire. Instead, the Lodi families are moving out ahead of the law after Fate convinced John to make some guns that violated patent law.
The families start out together but become separated on the trail. Each family has multiple children. Mattie is John's oldest, a daughter who chooses to go by a man's name and whose only desire is to be as much like her father as she can be. The mother is a frail woman who grieves everyday for her Kentucky home with its refinement. Fate has no patience with her and makes fun of her constantly. When she gets ill and can't go on, Fate moves his family onward without John's family. John's wife dies on the trail, leaving five children to be raised.
When the two Lodi families are reunited in Oklahoma, it is not with joy. John and the children come with scarlet fever, and Fate's wife, Jessie, resents them from the start, worrying about her own family coming down sick as well. The families never become close. John finds work as a blacksmith, much to Fate's dismay. Fate has plenty of ideas of things John could do with him but John isn't interested. Not in Fate's ideas nor it seems in his own children. They are left to raise themselves and do so with varying success. The tension between the brothers increases until it leads to a tragedy, an 1800's version of Cain and Abel.
Rilla Askew, an Oklahoman herself, has written a compelling history of this time and place. The characters are unforgettable and the story is bleak as was the fates of those who moved westward to find a better life, but who often only found pain and misery. Modern parents will not relate to the way that children were expected to be miniature adults from a young age and how little time or effort was expended on raising them to be happy and successful. This book is recommended for readers of historical fiction.
The families start out together but become separated on the trail. Each family has multiple children. Mattie is John's oldest, a daughter who chooses to go by a man's name and whose only desire is to be as much like her father as she can be. The mother is a frail woman who grieves everyday for her Kentucky home with its refinement. Fate has no patience with her and makes fun of her constantly. When she gets ill and can't go on, Fate moves his family onward without John's family. John's wife dies on the trail, leaving five children to be raised.
When the two Lodi families are reunited in Oklahoma, it is not with joy. John and the children come with scarlet fever, and Fate's wife, Jessie, resents them from the start, worrying about her own family coming down sick as well. The families never become close. John finds work as a blacksmith, much to Fate's dismay. Fate has plenty of ideas of things John could do with him but John isn't interested. Not in Fate's ideas nor it seems in his own children. They are left to raise themselves and do so with varying success. The tension between the brothers increases until it leads to a tragedy, an 1800's version of Cain and Abel.
Rilla Askew, an Oklahoman herself, has written a compelling history of this time and place. The characters are unforgettable and the story is bleak as was the fates of those who moved westward to find a better life, but who often only found pain and misery. Modern parents will not relate to the way that children were expected to be miniature adults from a young age and how little time or effort was expended on raising them to be happy and successful. This book is recommended for readers of historical fiction.
February 1, 2020
A genre-bending historical fiction/horror/mystery--I bought a copy of The Mercy Seat for its frontier cover splashed with award accolades, and gazed longingly at it on my to-read shelf for many years before finally tackling it. Reading The Mercy Seat is not for the fainthearted. If you have a taste for Old Testament stories and also enjoy the darkness of Cormac McCarthy and the brutal frontier reality of Lonesome Dove, this one is for you! I've spent my entire life in the South and West, and the Oklahoma setting is a perfect place to blend these cultures. I could hear my kinsmen from Kentucky and Tennessee in the spot-on dialect of the settlers. The richly developed characters, speaking from different vantage points, spin out the haunting storyline to its inevitable ending against the starkly beautiful, impossibly brutal scenery of a wild country. My favorite character, Thula Henry, is a Choctaw Christian healer and spiritual mentor to Mattie: "Each day Thula worked in silence, in patience, for she had a large purpose, and she knew God's time was long."
November 23, 2021
I loved her book, Kind of Kin, and while there is absolutely no doubt that Rilla Askew is an incredibly talented writer, I did not enjoy this book. Literary fiction, historical fiction- if she had stuck with just those, this novel would have been phenomenal, but pulling in the metaphysical/the native American mysticism was profoundly unsettling and unsatisfying. We humans have a need for certainty/understanding, and while Askew brilliantly managed the human part, trying to tackle the unknown/unexplainable might have been too much for any writer to attempt. I won't deny that she did as well as anyone could, but I personally would have preferred the book and story to stay grounded in the here and now. Thula's part was confusing, unresolved/unresolvable, frustrating, and ultimately unpleasant in its mysticism.
August 2, 2017
The book started out well, but the plot became weak. I found myself skimming through pages and pages of excruciating detail so often that even 3/4th of my way into the book I almost quit reading it...not even caring about the ending.
The last 100 pages or so grabbed my interest again, but the writing style of the author when she takes 15 pages to describe a man walking down a road was distracting to me.
Also, there are too many occasions where the author is describing an event and doing a wonderful job, but then goes off on a different tangent and it takes her sometimes 30 or 40 pages to get back to the event she was describing. Very difficult book for me to read.
The last 100 pages or so grabbed my interest again, but the writing style of the author when she takes 15 pages to describe a man walking down a road was distracting to me.
Also, there are too many occasions where the author is describing an event and doing a wonderful job, but then goes off on a different tangent and it takes her sometimes 30 or 40 pages to get back to the event she was describing. Very difficult book for me to read.
August 13, 2018
This book was incredibly well-written. What a brilliant author! Two brothers, as different in morals and character as daylight and dark, flee a patent infraction and move to Oklahoma with their families. The story is very reminiscent of Cain and Abel, focuses some on life in the Indian Nation, and delves pretty deeply into some very weird family relationships. This is no love story. The family members don't seem to have much emotion for each other at all. The story is stark, brooding, and at times a bit plodding. But if you love descriptive language and introspection, I bet you will like it. Pretty amazing book, although I wouldn't read it again.
August 24, 2019
A deeply interesting read... full of Oklahoma and male and female Indian/White Man history. It felt more real than anything I've ever read about the period and the place-- about two brothers and their families who fled Kentucky into Indian Territory (Eye Tee). Wonderful characters and voices, fully drawn, like no others I've met in literature. Unique, intriguing, difficult to read at times, and tragic
July 26, 2021
Descriptions were thick and slowed my reading, but gave an incredible sense of place and time.Jessie and Thula became the most interesting women in the story, although Jonafree was intriguing as well. I would not recommend this to a casual reader, but people who love to “chew” what they read will appreciate it.
August 23, 2017
There were parts of this book I really enjoyed, and parts I had to skim thru just to move on. Beautifully written for the most part but a pretty depressing story overall. I think it does give a very good sense of what it must have been like for people living in Indian Territory around the turn of the century - tough living, not for sissies.
April 26, 2020
A sad story with exceptional writing.
September 28, 2022
Quite the long slog.
August 28, 2025
The first half was engaging and interesting story about family and struggle in the west. Second half was pretty dull and winding. I had to force myself to finish it.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews