63 pages • 2 hours read
David Adams RichardsMercy Among the Children
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 2, Chapters 12-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Fury”
Part 2, Chapters 12-17 Summary
For two years, Sydney Henderson works as a garbage man, though his IQ is around 170. Lyle buys contacts and a wig for Autumn with the money he earns working for McVicer. He wishes he could disown his parents.
A letter comes through the post that the Hendersons expect will exonerate Sydney, but instead it is from the tax office. The Hendersons owe $17,000 in back taxes plus interest, from Sydney’s ill-fated well digging business. Sydney leaves for the power line they are putting through the north of the province. It will take two or three years for him to clear the debt. Lyle tells Sydney he is ashamed of him. The following day, Lyle asks Leo McVicer for the loan of the money and says he will work to pay it back. McVicer tells Lyle to finish school, but that he will employ Lyle and put Autumn through university when Lyle graduates.
The following day, Lyle goes to school with the ambition to graduate but punches a teacher who had just suspended Cheryl Voteur. Lyle swears he will never return to school. Sydney says he believes God is testing him, and Lyle calls him a fool. Sydney tries to grab Lyle’s knife from him and sustains a cut. Lyle tells Sydney that Elly is sick and Autumn has no self-esteem. Autumn and Elly overhear, and the family grieves. The next morning, Sydney is gone, leaving a note telling Lyle he is right, and that he will return when he has repaid the debt.
Percy is only three, and Lyle acts as his stand-in father. Lyle worries about the way Percy wanders about by himself. Elly tells Lyle to look after his siblings, but he leaves them alone to fish. Lyle ponders how Elly stayed with Sydney because she loves him. He finds Autumn and Percy asleep at home.
A local man, Bliss Hanrahan, tells officer John Delano that Connie Devlin must have been responsible for destroying the bridge, and about the threatening letters Sydney received.
Lyle gets into several fights and has to go to court. Isabel Young advocates on his behalf, and he does community service. When the family runs out of oil, he steals wood. Elly says that the spontaneous replenishment of the wood seems like a “miracle,” but it is Lyle who keeps it stocked.
Constable Morris courts Elly, and Lyle begins to drink. Darren Voteur is pursuing Autumn, but she does not return his affections.
Part 2, Chapters 12-17 Analysis
That Sydney wears a suit to his garbage collection job is a parody of the normal markers of societal status. Conflating the high with the low, Sydney indicates that he operates outside the system, and sees his work as a test, akin to that faced by Job in the Bible. Lyle’s dressing Autumn is also an experiment in social role playing and appearances, except that Lyle would reverse his father’s oddity by camouflaging the uniqueness of his sister’s features. Although ashamed of his family, Lyle reflects on the absurdity of their position:
[T]he ideas that encapsulated both him and my mother—that he had ever thought (and why in God’s name should he?) he would be forced to literally live it with the excruciating balancing act of a man on a tightrope in the wind. But then again, in some way—don’t we all? (231).
The novel itself walks a similar kind of tightrope, suspended between realism and allegory, wry intertextuality and earnest social commentary.
Though Autumn encourages Lyle to follow in the footsteps of David Copperfield (from Charles Dickens’s 1850 Bildungsroman of the same name) when McVicer offers him a job if he stays in school and offers to pay for Autumn’s tuition, Lyle immediately sabotages his chances by hitting a teacher. His rebellion against learning arrests his growth.
There are several notable parallels between David Copperfield and Lyle’s narrative, perhaps most notably, the trials of a young man surrounded by untrustworthy people. While Dickens retains a sense of underlying faith in the human spirit, Richards offers no such panacea, nor does Lyle have any faith in the social welfare systems that Dickens vehemently supported. The absence of the father and death of the mother and her child are another of many parallels between the novels.
More biblical concepts appear in Chapters 15 through 17. Teresa May is named for Saint Teresa, though her mother has not made this connection. Lyle’s fishing aligns him with the disciples of Jesus, several of whom were humble fishermen. That the family runs out of oil is a reversal of the Jewish miracle of the oil in the temple, which kept burning despite having run out, the story behind the festival of Hanukkah. In the Christian tradition, it was Jesus who became the light of the world. Elly pronounces the replenishment of the wood a “miracle,” though Lyle knows that it is deceit and not God’s provenance that sustains the family.
Losing the children echoes the biblical parable of the lost child, searching for God the father. Lyle has lost the children, and he has also lost his father: “went up the warm and shadowy hill looking for a sign of my children (for this is how I thought of them)” (237). References to the childlike nature of all the characters pepper the novel Mercy Among the Children, for instance, Isabel Young’s name. “All is madness without love,” an aphorism Elly imparts to her children, might be a distillation of Christ’s teaching.
