The Heaven of Mercury (2002)by Brad Watson

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Heaven of Mercury (2002)

by Brad Watson

Mercury, Mississippi

Mississippi: 16/19

     Living in California, it is easy to lose track of the relative size of places like it and New York to places like Alabama and Mississippi.  For example, the largest city in Mississippi is Jackson and it has a population of 146k.  In California, Jackson would be the 40th largest city, between Visalia and Victorville.  The total population of Mississippi, just about 3 million, is smaller than the CITY of Los Angeles, let alone the county or metropolitan statistical area.   Of course, the founding fathers foresaw this, which is why we are saddled with a political system which allows areas like the deep south and rural Midwest to put their candidates into the Presidency at the expense of places like California and New York.

     For places like Mississippi, it's not a question of the city/town/rural distinction of more populated areas, rather it is a question of small towns and rural areas.  Even the books putatively mapped onto urban areas in Mississippi take place in rural settings.   The Heaven of Mercury is a pure example of the small-town novel, nominated for the National Book Award for fiction back in 2002 about a local newspaper editor and his lifetime of unrequited love for a childhood almost-sweetheart.

    I've observed before that the use of a map to plot the titles in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America presupposes certain kind of plots and narrators.  None of the book in the Mississippi chapter split their temporality between Mississippi and some other place.  Characters who leave Mississippi leave the novel.  This means you have a choice between people coming back from some other place and people who never leave.   Within that category Mississippi is almost unique in that NONE of the novels are about people coming back from some other place and ALL of the books are about people who never leave. 

  At least, with our newspaper editor character in The Heaven of Mercury we have a literate protagonist. 

Finus, the protagonist, is, I think, the most sophisticated of any of the protagonists in the Mississippi titles.