[In the following review, Steiner offers tempered criticism of Mercy. According to Steiner, "Ms. Dworkin's argument, proceeding from pain, may be moving, but it is also intolerant, simplistic and often just as brutal as what it protests."]

This past spring in London, with an hour to kill in a bookstore, I decided to read the first few pages of as many new novels as I could. Among the recent releases was Mercy, a second novel by the controversial feminist Andrea Dworkin, better known to me for her nonfiction tirades against pornography, against intercourse, against men. She was not a writer I would normally be drawn to, but in the spirit of experimentation I read through the first chapter. It was a representation of sexual trauma through a 9-year-old child's bewilderment, and I found myself utterly transfixed; I had to keep on reading. But although it seemed powerful to me as fiction then, I now see Ms. Dworkin's book in a larger context—as another salvo in the war between liberals and radicals. Once again the noddy head of tolerance is pummeled by the unbrookable demands of outraged pain.

Mercy is spoken in the voice of a woman named Andrea, who tells us the story of her life. It is a Bildungsroman, composed to explain why she now kills men. "I was born in 1946," she says, "after Auschwitz, after the bomb, I never wanted to kill, I had an abhorrence for killing but it was raped from me, raped from my brain, obliterated, like freedom. I'm a veteran of Birkenau and Massada and deep throat, uncounted rapes, thousands of men, I'm twentyseven, I don't sleep." Brutally attacked and cruelly disillusioned in each of the novel's 11 chapters, Andrea goes from a child raised among liberal Jews in Camden, N.J., to an alcoholic bag lady who kills bums as they sleep in the streets of New York. Mercy is a monologue that almost makes her deviance seem normal; its voice speaks in extremis out of a pain so compelling that patience and reason appear to be obscenely insensitive responses. Andrea's experience is meant to stand as that of all women and to constitute an unassailable argument against the attempt to coexist peaceably with men.

Bracketing Andrea's monologue are a short prologue and epilogue, each called "Not Andrea," in which feminist voices express the very calm and temperance that Andrea's pain invalidates. "As a woman of letters, I fight for my kind, for women, for freedom," says the speaker in the prologue. "The brazen scream distracts. The wild harridans are not persuasive…. I will not shout. This is not the ovens." This point of view gets short shrift in Mercy.

Ms. Dworkin's book denies measure, denies the difference between the metaphorical and the literal. In Mercy, women's experience is the ovens; women are the mass suicides of Massada. Andrea is not a persona or a character but Ms. Dworkin herself; art is life. Pornography is evil because it condones and incites the rape of women. Representation is power. All men's behavior toward women is finally rape. "Your heartbeat and his heartbeat can be the same heartbeat and it's still" rape.

This degradation, for Ms. Dworkin, is inevitable, however women may strive against it: "My mother named me Andrea. It means manhood or courage…. This one's someone, she probably had in mind; a wish; a hope; let her, let her, something…. Don't, not with this one. Just let this one through. Just don't do it to this one…. My mama showed that fiction was delusion, hallucination, it was a long, deranged lie designed to last past your own lifetime." Men's fictions of bondage and rape are the truth; women's fictions of liberation and equality are lies. Representation is power only if you are a man.

But Mercy itself is meant to provide a new representational strategy. Andrea's language is lyrical and passionate—a cross between the repetition of the early Gertrude Stein and, ironically, the unfettered flights of Henry Miller. She describes sexual violence in graphic terms, risking the prurience of the pornography she deplores. But unlike any antipornography text that I know, Mercy defeats prurience. It is to pornography what aversion therapy is to rape. The titillating language of violation—"one hand's holding my neck from behind and the other's pulling off my T-shirt, pulling it half off, ripping it"—becomes noxious with Andrea's terror and pain and the inhuman viciousness and betrayal of the men she has trusted. Her stylistic breathlessness—repetition, rhythm, loss of control—conveys not rising passion but the desperate need to have the violence end.

Andrea writes to change reality: "I have to be the writer [my mother] tried to be—Andrea …—only I have to do it so it ain't a lie … [I'm] just going to bleed all over you and you are going to have to find the words to describe the stain, a stain as big as [my] real life, boy; a big, nasty stain, a stain all over you, all the blood you ever spilled, that's the esthetic dimension." In this way, Andrea says, she is giving men the choice to be human or not, and turning women's weakness and loss into gain: "The less, the more, you see, is the basic principle, it's like psychological jujitsu except applied to politics through a shocking esthetic."

The ambition, the verbal brilliance, in this "shocking esthetic" are profoundly affecting, and the repulsiveness of the Not Andrea voice in the epilogue is the great scandal of our times—reason's inability to offer an acceptable answer to the pain that everywhere surrounds us. This weakness is the undoing of liberalism: in the sordid mess of the political correctness debate, the Mapplethorpe debacle and Salman Rushdie's collision with Islam, in the failure of communication between feminists inside the system and those outside it.

Ms. Dworkin's argument, proceeding from pain, may be moving, but it is also intolerant, simplistic and often just as brutal as what it protests. Ms. Dworkin advocates nothing short of killing men. The last chapter ends: "I went out; at night; to smash a man's face in, I declared war. My nom de guerre is Andrea One; I am reliably told there are many more; girls named courage who are ready to kill." One cannot argue here, any more than Mr. Rushdie could, that statements in literature are not equivalent to statements in the real world. Ms. Dworkin's pain erases the boundary between the two spheres, declaring the distinction a male trick to justify pornography and rape. Either her book must be absolved of murderous intent through special pleading—the invocation of that very magic circle around art that she has worked so hard to deny—or else we must accept that we are reading a political manifesto justifying and inciting illegal acts. Either way, we are caught in a bind. We must either deplore Ms. Dworkin's duplicity, which would be unfeeling, or have her arrested, which would mean we were assenting to the literalism that is our own undoing.

Perhaps the most glaring weakness in Ms. Dworkin's esthetic is her indifference to other people's pain. She keeps insisting on her debt to Walt Whitman, whose house was on her street in Camden, but she denounces him for his false promises of democracy, never considering the pain of his homosexuality. And she is completely ruthless with women who do not share her point of view.

The Not Andrea of the epilogue turns out to be a lesbian who gets along fine with exploitative men because she inflicts on her lover the same bondage and sadism that men practice. Not Andrea's arguments are undercut by this revelation and by the stiltedness of the language placed in her mouth, and this strategy on Ms. Dworkin's part is cheap. The issues are important enough to be raised by a character whose liberalism is not so obviously corrupt.

The question is how we can deal with pain, conviction, compulsions that we do not share. Or alternately, the question is whom Ms. Dworkin thinks she is speaking to. By reading Mercy we are meant to experience her pain, to know it as our own. Will we take the next step—as women, becoming Andrea Two or Three or Ten, or as men, bending to the task of describing the blood that has stained us? Or is the matter put in terms too crude, too intellectually violent, to offer us the possibility of action? If all women are either victims or collaborators and all men are rapists, can the cry for mercy fall on any but deaf ears?