[In the following review, Heller offers unfavorable assessment of Mercy.]

In 1983, Andrea Dworkin gave a speech to students at Hamilton College in upstate New York. "I represent the morbid side of the women's movement", she began. "I deal with the shit, the real shit." Seven years on, Dworkin's commitment to the dirty work of feminism shows no signs of letting up. "The shit"—or more specifically, the physical abuse of women by men—is still her specialization.

Her second novel, Mercy, is the story of Dworkin's alter-ego, "Andrea", a young woman whose journey through the misogynist world ("this zoo of sickies and sadists") constitutes an almost encyclopaedic survey of male sexual violence. Andrea begins her first-person narrative with an account of being assaulted in a cinema at the age of nine. Adolescence is french-kissing dirty old men on buses, and sex at knife-point with the neighbourhood tough. Adulthood is heralded by being raped "properly" for the first time.

The young Andrea is a Walt Whitman fan. She wants to sing the body electric and contain multitudes. But wherever she goes and whatever she does, she confronts a relentless male hostility. She is sent to jail for being on a peace demo, and sadistic doctors rip her up inside with a speculum. She travels to Crete and is raped again. She returns to New York and is raped in her apartment by a local gang-leader. A man comes to rescue her but proceeds to rape her himself, biting her genitalia to shreds.

And on the brutalities go—not so much set down, as spewed out in an anguished, paragraphless emission. Her prose revels in its own paratactic disorder, rejecting all "bourgic" refinements. "Nightmares don't have a linear logic with narrative development," she explains, "Terror ain't aesthetic."

This is a tricky position for a novelist to adopt. "Andrea" insists on a raw, traumatized prose style because anything more "aesthetic" would, she says, let us off too easily—make the horror too palatable. This implies a curiously primitive notion of how art achieves its impact. By piling up the gore and punctuating each fresh grotesquerie with a yell of retrospective pain, Andrea isn't shocking us into truth. She is ranting. There is no suffering so profound that it cannot be rendered banal by bad prose, and Mercy confirms this uncomfortable fact.

Andrea also rejects theoretical subtleties. Evil things are evil, she says. Rape is evil. Men are evil. "You may find me one who ain't guilty but you can't find me two." One has a feeling that this rough and ready philosophizing is leading somewhere nasty, and sure enough, Andrea concludes her story by declaring war on the opposite sex. She has taken to roaming the streets at night, beating up male tramps. "I hurt them and I run; and I fucking don't care about fair; discuss fair at the U.N." She plans to expand her one-woman terrorism act into an international guerilla force. "I've always wanted to see a man beaten to a shit bloody pulp with a high-heeled shoe stuffed up his mouth, sort of the pig with the apple."

Ho hum. Anticipating the objections to this radical revenge strategy, Dworkin has framed Andrea's narrative with a prologue and epilogue entitled "Not Andrea." The woman who speaks in these sections is a parody of the fudging, liberal feminist. She insists that as a university academic, her interest is in theory, not "direct human experience." She says it is "tiresome" to dwell on sexual abuse. She suggests that rape has "transformative dimensions." She is, of course, offensive and ludicrous. And she is meant to make our weedy reservations stick in our throats.

It is immense intellectual dishonesty on Dworkin's part, though, to have characterized her critics in this way. One doesn't have to think rape is transformative to query whether all men are "Nazis without uniforms." One doesn't have to prize theory over experience to wonder about the efficacy of beating up tramps. Dworkin has written a mad, bad novel; and one doesn't have to be a man, a rapist, or a self-hating woman to admit as much.