Mercury

July 11, 2016
Livesey’s latest (following The Flight of Gemma Hardy) is a fiercely intelligent exploration of the ways blindness—to ourselves, others, and the power of passion and grief—can divide and transform us. After his father dies of Parkinson’s, optometrist Donald Stevenson’s reserve deepens into what Viv, his wife of nine years, likens to the airless impenetrability of an astronaut’s suit. Viv’s teenage dreams of equestrian competition resurface when Mercury, an exceptionally promising thoroughbred, comes to board at the suburban Boston stable she helps run. Donald; Viv’s boss, Claudia; and Mercury’s owner, Hilary, assume that Viv accepts the obvious: Mercury is not hers to risk, compete on, or control. Facing their resistance to her growing obsession and increasingly distanced from Donald, Viv conceals the time and money she lavishes on the horse. When the stable is repeatedly broken into, she fears that telling Claudia or Hilary will lead to Mercury’s removal. Instead, she buys a gun. Seen primarily from Donald’s muffled, sometimes pedantic perspective, the novel unfolds patiently, through a chain of small and mostly well-intentioned deceptions that nevertheless yield catastrophe. Livesey’s skillful play with the title’s many meanings—trickster god of speed, diagnostic aid, minor planet, deadly poison—gives her narrative a rich imagery that interweaves seamlessly with its textured evocation of everyday life.

April 15, 2016

Following The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a New York Times best seller in paperback that greatly boosted Livesey's sales record, this novel stars a beautiful thoroughbred named Mercury, newly boarded at the suburban Boston stable run by Viv.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2016
Another probing study of the way character shapes our destinies from the author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy (2012), etc.It's perhaps a bit much to make Donald an optometrist, given that he confesses shortly after disclosing his occupation that he failed to see wife Viv's obsession with a horse named Mercury until it was much too late. But Livesey, a Scottish transplant whose brilliant novels are underknown in her adopted country, rings so many dazzling changes on the subjects of eyesight, hindsight, and blinkered sight that she may be forgiven the whiff of contrivance in her setup. Donald's personality is utterly credible: cautious, precise, Scottish-ly phlegmatic yet roiled by deep feelings of loss. They go back to boyhood, when his family's move from Edinburgh to Boston cost Donald his best friend, and have been elevated to devastating levels by the recent death of his father after a long siege of Parkinson's disease. The intensity of Donald's attachment to his father is palpable but never really explained; Livesey has a healthy respect for the mysteries of the human heart. Viv, who narrates the novel's middle section, is rendered with somewhat less nuance: her lifelong need to be the best, focused on riding in adolescence and only temporarily derailed to a career in mutual funds, re-emerges with a scary edge when Mercury arrives at the stable she now runs with her best friend, Claudia. It's hard to be entirely sympathetic when she tells Donald (accurately), "Since your dad died you've been MIA," as we see Viv driven into secrecy and lies by her hysterical need to make Mercury a champion and herself a star. But Donald also keeps secrets, one of which contributes to a ghastly act of misdirected violence that leads to a dance of regret, recrimination, and indecision bringing further losses for husband and wife. A sharply sketched supporting cast adds to the depth and cumulative power of this grimly great novel. Uncharacteristically dark, yet more evidence of Livesey's formidable gifts.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 1, 2016
Obsession can take even the most ordinary of lives and twist it into something irredeemably unrecognizable. Hillary is a single mother who has come into possession of her deceased brother's Thoroughbred racehorse, Mercury, and decides to board the stallion at Viv Stephenson's stables. Talk about love at first sight. A wife and mother, but, most of all, a lapsed equestrian, Viv sees in Mercury her second chance at a competitive career, one she's willing to pursue at the cost of her marriage and family. Paranoid about real and imagined threats to Mercury, Viv buys a black-market gun and has opportunity to use it the night Viv's optician husband, Donald, brings Hillary and his best friend, Jack, to the stables after hours so Hillary can visit her horse. Mistaking them for intruders, Viv shoots and severely wounds Jack. Told from both Donald's and Viv's perspectives, best-selling Livesey's (The Flight of Gemma Hardy, 2012) story of loyalty, deceit, ambition, and moral ambiguity is a read-in-one-sitting, sublimely nuanced psychological exploration of personal ethics and responsibility ideal for book-discussion groups.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2016

Winner of the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize for You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, Kleeman returns with 12 edgy stories that have a surreal, even primal feel. A young woman, sitting in a dining room with her parents, is confused by the increasing number of unrecognizable men (one murderous) claiming to be her suitors, while a dancing-master in an unspecified time and place is smugly convinced that his art can civilize a feral lad who's staggered into the village. Elsewhere, a journalist fails to connect with a man she's met while trying to write a story about a dairy farmer, and meteorological events have a scattered impact on family in a too-fragmented narrative. VERDICT Disturbing and fantastical in concept if not in language, these stories have the same disaffected feel as Kleeman's novel and won't convince all readers. For Kleeman fans. [See Prepub Alert, 3/21/16.]

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2016

Donald and Viv, at a turning point in their marriage, are implementing all the changes they once eschewed. Leaving Boston and Viv's high-powered career behind, they relocate to the suburbs, where Donald, an optometrist, opens his own practice and Viv can indulge her long-subsumed passion for horses. Training riders at Windy Hill stables affords Viv time for their two children and for Donald's dad, who has Parkinson's. But from the moment Mercury trots into the paddock, locking eyes with Viv, there's a seismic shift in the atmosphere. Livesey (The Flight of Gemma Hardy) has a penchant for creating a sense of foreboding in her novels, and readers who recall that Mercury was the Roman god who led souls to the underworld will not be surprised when Viv's behavior turns uncharacteristically quixotic. Literally and figuratively, the symbolism of blindness weighs heavily on this narrative. Enhancing the vision is Donald's trade, yet he fails to perceive that Viv's obsession with the thoroughbred, and their inability to communicate about it, will result in catastrophe. VERDICT A prolific author and esteemed professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Livesey has written a tangled morality tale not about a horse but about a marriage and friendships disintegrating under the steady drip of secrets and half-truths. There's plenty for discussion here. [See Prepub Alert, 3/21/16.]--Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.