SOURCE: "Sustaining a Scream," in Chicago Tribune Books, September 15, 1991, p. 5.

In the following review, Bell offers favorable assessment of Mercy. Bell praises Dworkin as "a brilliant and passionate theoretician" whose "anger is a polished and dangerous instrument."

"Now I've come into my own as a woman of letters," goes the prologue of Andrea Dworkin's second novel, Mercy. "I admit to a cool, elegant intellect with a clear superiority over the apelike men who write…." Some apelike reviewers may find this sort of thing prejudicially annoying. Let the reader be warned.

But the main body of the novel is told in a different voice, by a first-person narrator named Andrea, presumably distinct from Dworkin herself and certainly different from the author of the prologue, who is somewhat confusingly identified as "Not Andrea." It's the narrating Andrea that controls most of the text, which is most interesting for its aggressive...