SOURCE: "Review Article: Dworkin's Mercy," in Feminist Review, No. 38, Summer, 1991, pp. 79-85.

In the following review, Kaveney offers tempered criticism of Mercy, which she describes as "an ambitious novel." Kaveney writes, "The real failure of this book is not in the cheating, or the calculated omissions, or the implicit elitism; it is in the deep solipsism that characterizes it from beginning to end."

Polemical novels are problematic, both ethically and aesthetically. When a novel is merely a novel, the aesthetic questions around it have to do with how well it achieves its artistic ends: a critic may prefer Alexandrian trickiness, or may prefer simple passionate utterance, but these preferences are matters of opinion. When we are considering a polemic, the questions that have to be asked deal with the position advocated, but also with the methods adopted; most would agree that a polemic in favour of an egalitarian...