Mercury (Livesey)

Mercury 
Margot Livesey, 2016
HarperCollins
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062437501


Summary
Donald believes he knows all there is to know about seeing. An optometrist in suburban Boston, he is sure that he and his wife, Viv, who runs the local stables, are both devoted to their two children and to each other.

Then Mercury—a gorgeous young thoroughbred with a murky past—arrives at Windy Hill and everything changes.

Mercury’s owner, Hilary, is a newcomer to town who has enrolled her daughter in riding lessons. When she brings Mercury to board at Windy Hill, everyone is struck by his beauty and prowess, particularly Viv.

As she rides him, Viv begins to dream of competing again, embracing the ambitions that she had harbored, and relinquished, as a young woman. Her daydreams soon morph into consuming desire, and her infatuation with the thoroughbred escalates to obsession.

Donald may have 20/20 vision but he is slow to notice how profoundly Viv has changed and how these changes threaten their quiet, secure world. By the time he does, it is too late to stop the catastrophic collision of Viv’s ambitions and his own myopia.

At once a tense psychological drama and a taut emotional thriller exploring love, obsession, and the deceits that pull a family apart, Mercury is a riveting tour de force that showcases this "searingly intelligent writer at the height of her powers." (Jennifer Egan).  (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 24, 1953
• Where—Perth, Scotland, UK
• Education—B.A., University of York, England
• Awards—L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award
• Currently—Boston, Massachusetts, USA


Margot Livesey is a Scottish born writer. She is the author of eight novels, numerous short stories, and essays on the craft of writing fiction.

Livesey came to North America during the 1970s where she worked to get her fiction published, reportedly because her boyfriend at the time was also a writer.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and a number of literary quarterlies. She is also the Fiction Editor at Ploughshares, a renowned literary journal. Livesey served as a judge for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction in 2012.

She currently lives in the Boston area and is the writer-in-residence at Emerson College and at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has formally served as a professor at Boston University, Bowdoin College, Tufts University, Carnegie Mellon University, Brandeis University, Cleveland State University, Williams College, and at the University of California, Irvine. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/16/2016.)

When asked by Barnes and Noble editors in 2004, what book influenced her the most, Livesey had this to say:

This sounds self-centered but the book that had the biggest impact on me as a writer was the novel I wrote when I was twenty-two and traveling around Europe and North Africa. When I reread it at the end of the year I was amazed at how completely I had failed to be influenced by the many wonderful books I'd read. My characters were unbelievable, their conversations preposterous, the plot simultaneously dull and far-fetched, etc., etc. Seeing the enormous gap between the books I loved and my own was what made me want to be a writer in a serious way.

Book Reviews
[F]iercely intelligent.... [T]he novel unfolds patiently, through a chain of small and mostly well-intentioned deceptions that nevertheless yield catastrophe. [R]ich imagery that interweaves seamlessly with its textured evocation of everyday life.
Publishers Weekly


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. —Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
Library Journal


Livesey’s 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. —Carol Haggas
Booklist


(Starred review.) Another probing study of the way character shapes our destinies from [Margot Livesey].... 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.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Mercury...then take off on your own:

1. What is the state of Donald and Viv's marriage when we first meet them? What are the fault lines in their relationship that you begin to detect early on? What are they like as individual characters—how would you describe each of them?

2. (Follow-up to Question 1): When Donald first moved the the U.S. as a boy, he wrote for years to his best friend, only to stop when he had to admit he wasn't coming back. What does this say about him? Talk about other ways that Donald, even as an adult, confronts painful emotions.

3. (Follow up to Question 1): Talk about Viv and her attachment to Mercury. How might the death of Viv's previous horse have heightened her passion for the new horse? What affect does her obsession with riding Mercury to victory? Is she delusional?

4. At what point in the plot did you begin to sense impending danger? When do events become foreboding?

5. Donald is the primary narrator of the novel. Why might Livesey have chosen to tell the story through his eyes? And speaking of eyes, what is the irony of the fact that Donald is an optometrist?

6. Talk about Mercury as a literary symbol? Think about Mercury as a Greek deity, a chemical element, and a planet. How do all those symbolic references come into play in this novel?

7. What does this story reveal about the way in which personal character can shape destiny?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, on online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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