Julie's Reviews > Mercury

Mercury begins promisingly enough: a lovely young thing moves into a hardscrabble western Pennsylvania town and catches the eyes of a pair of handsome brothers who revere their mother and submit to carrying on the family roofing business started by their mercurial father. They vie for the new girl in a Cain and Abel rivalry that's also tied up in some sort of Oedipal complex with their mother and a King Lear-ish fever dream of a father.

The prose is often deft and sharp, but also too often florid. Burns is fond of describing everything in threes: "She was exhausted, and dirty, and frightened." "The bloodshed wasn't like her monthly period; it was urgent and clotted and woeful." and of making dramatic, declarative statements that are meant to be harbingers of doom: "Marley went to her husband, did as she'd always done, and made his stains, his pain, her own." "Elise was a woman who had opened her home and her table, yet not her heart, because she had no room left in it. Her husband and her boys had taken it all." Because these fraught ruminations happen so often, they weigh the story down with angst that wrests away plausibility. I was both deflated and bored soon after the halfway mark.

Mercury stumbles over its attempts to ratchet up the tension by plowing heavy emotion into every scene. It's 315 pages of melodrama, with characters who are miserable, deeply enamored of their misery, and have made it their personal missions to make everyone else around them just as miserable as they are.