[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 style. It's difficult to sustain a scream for over 300 pages, but Dworkin's narrator does quite a good job, using long tumbling run-on sentences to achieve a powerful effect.

Perhaps it would not have been too submissive for her to paragraph occasionally. But there's only one significant strategic error, the persistent misconjugation of verbs, which Dworkin deploys in hopes of sounding more proletarian or street-inured, maybe. This mistake is unlike her, for she is a very sophisticated and persuasive prose stylist whose craft and determination make her non-fiction manifesto Intercourse something to admire, whether the reader agrees with it or not.

For a writer who functions best at the highest levels of rhetoric, the dialect touches are a false note, but otherwise the fictional Andrea's voice is a potent mix, if not always a tasty one—something like a blend of Molly Bloom and Medea. At its best it can fuse a lyrical intensity with the sort of pointed abstract argument so strongly made in Dworkin's nonfiction work:

I went to unlock the two locks on my door to my apartment and the first lock just crumbled, little metal pieces fell as if it was spiders giving birth, all the little ones falling out of it, it just seemed pulverized into grains and it just was crushed to sand, the whole cylinder of the lock just collapsed almost into molecules; and the second lock just kept turning around and around but absolutely nothing locked or unlocked and then there was this sound of something falling and it had fallen through the door to the other side, it just fell out of the door. It was night, and even putting the chain on didn't help. I sat with my knife and stared at it all night to keep anyone from breaking in. The crisis of getting new locks left me destitute and desperate and on such occasions I had to steal.

Structurally, the book seems more loose and amorphous than it really may be, patterned on the amoebic expansion and contractions of Walt Whitman's poetry. Andrea was born near Whitman's house in Camden, N.J., and the ambivalence of her relationship to the poet is reiterated in a looping pattern somewhere near the beginning of every of chapter. Andrea's voice generates a Whitmanesque interplay between world and self, without troubling too much about narrative specificity. The text is more concerned with the evolution of Andrea's sensibility than with the events of her life and although the events are related in chronological order they seem to float discontinuously within the sensibility.

Most of the significant events are rapes, beginning with a technically unconsummated molestation in a movie theater when Andrea is nine. This first chapter is one of the best, showing in swift sure strokes how not only the assault itself but also her parents' poor handling of it make Andrea feel completely isolated and abandoned by everyone, including God. But when she next appears she is five years older and involved in all sorts of rough, sordid but apparently consensual sex (though readers of Intercourse will know that in Dworkin's larger scheme of things any woman's desire for penetration by a man is merely the product and mechanism of her enslaved degradation).

It's unfortunate not to know how she got from the first stage to the second, for in the latter phase she often seems to be, like the character Tralala in Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit To Brooklyn, as much a victim of her own carnality as of the lustful cruelty of others.

Between rapes, Andrea survives on the fringes of '60s political action, working for an anti-war organization. Estranged from her parents in her teens, she becomes a semi-street person, dependent for shelter on unreliable and often dangerous hippie hospitality. She takes some male lovers willingly and engages in some lesbian encounters that aren't much dwelt on. In Europe she marries a terrorist who, when romance wears thin, ties her up and beats and rapes her; these sadistic explosions become part of the routine of their domestic life.

Back in New York she returns to a bohemian twilight zone where she is vulnerable in many ways, not just sexually: often without money, food, or shelter, often helplessly drunk. Each chapter shows how these circumstances converge on another rape. The last, an especially brutal "deep throat" rape, so radicalizes Andrea that she begins car-bombing porno stores and murdering male winos on the street, telling herself, "none of them's innocent and who cares?"

There's hardly any plot in the conventional sense and not really any characters, except Andrea; the others are just more heads on the hydra that's out to crush and devour her. All the men are rapists and all the women let her down somehow: her mother (especially), her political acquaintances, the martial arts master she turns to when she begins to realize "it is very important for women to kill men."

Her only real friend is her dog; her eulogy to the dog is one the book's most affecting passages. Otherwise, the main virtues are prodigies of interpretation rather than imagination, an ingenious analysis of a Huey Newton news-photo, an explosive attack on pornography. The book carries too heavy a polemical burden to work very well as a novel.

But very likely Dworkin is more interested in producing a politically effective text than an esthetic object. Indeed the prologue and epilogue, which turn out to be parody, are meant to preempt objections to her violent radicalism that more moderate feminists might raise. There are other objections, however, which she does not address.

If Andrea Dworkin is the Malcolm X of feminism, then this novel is her version of his Autobiography. Dworkin is such an astute political analyst that she certainly must know how her tactics resemble Malcolm's, especially the uncompromising demonization of all members of the enemy group. Black Island's "the whitey" has its analogue, too. For irony, compare the fictional Andrea's murders of winos with Eldridge Cleaver's rape of white girls. But the real catch is that while black separation is at least theoretically plausible, female separatism is not.

Dworkin does not supply any alternative myth; unlike some other feminists she has not gone Goddess-chasing. Never afraid to confront all the implications of her thinking, she concludes that only a male God could have devised a creation so inimical to women. But even with God declared non-existent, a biology that requires sexual intercourse for species survival remains, as she puts it in Intercourse, "immune to reform"—never mind the hope she holds for "new reproductive technologies."

What's next? An all-out war of women on men is no more likely to occur than the all-out war of blacks on whites that didn't happen in the '60s. Malcolm went to Mecca and came back changed, but it's hard to imagine where Andrea Dworkin can go from here. Still, she is a brilliant and passionate theoretician, her anger is a polished and dangerous instrument, and even some of the people she's marked as enemies can hope she finds her way.