MERCY STREET

Having addressed fracking in Heat and Light (2016), Haigh now tackles abortion in a polemical novel that revolves around a Boston women’s clinic.

Divorced and childless, 43-year-old Claudia is an abortion counselor at Mercy Street, a clinic in a gentrified area of Boston once known as the Combat Zone. As the daughter of an impoverished single teenage mother, she well understands “the stark daily realities that made motherhood impossible” for many of her clients. After nine years, Claudia is a pro at taking care of the patients while ignoring the protestors who gather outside the clinic every morning. Still, the stresses of the job get to her (the women with late-term pregnancies “cracked her open”), so periodically Claudia seeks relief from her pot dealer, Timmy. Also dropping in to make a buy is Anthony, a lonely incel living off disability insurance in his mother’s basement. Anthony spends his days attending Mass, protesting at Mercy Street, and emailing photos of women going into the clinic to an anti-abortion crusader with the screen name of Excelsior11, who's actually a Vietnam vet and former long-haul trucker named Victor Prine. During the winter of 2015, these four characters, whose social isolation keeps them as frozen as Boston’s stormy weather, will find their lives intersecting and transformed, not always for the better. Haigh excels at depicting people beaten down by life, but it’s hard to feel much sympathy for her drearily drawn male protagonists, who are less nuanced individuals than indistinguishable stereotypes. With the anti-abortion movement gathering steam in the legislative arena, her portrait feels dated.

Despite its flaws, Haigh’s novel will provide plenty of discussion fodder for reading groups.