Mercy, Mary, Patty by Lola Lafon (review)

First and foremost, this complex mélange of fact and fiction requires the reader's full attention from the first page to the very last. The simple title invites us to imagine the story of three historical figures who were kidnapped and then influenced to perceive the world in ways radically different from what they had been raised to see as "normal" and "right." From a thematic perspective this foreshadowing is useful. Simplicity, however, is not what awaits us. This is a novel where characters are difficult to pin down and where stories are carefully woven into other stories. Narrative techniques flow into each other and chronology, too, is in flux. However, if we are willing to suspend our desire for a literary sense of security, as perhaps we did when reading our first nouveau roman, we will be surprised at the power of Lola Lafon's approach. We have a character whose identity we do not know speaking in the second person, vous, to a character whose identity is also unknown to us. This"vous,"we learn, wrote a book entitled Mercy Mary Patty in 1977. Our narrator thus recounts the story of this author not to us directly, but to her. In this way we learn that "vous" is an American academic named Gene Neveva. In 1975, while teaching in France, she was hired to analyze documents to help exonerate Patricia Hearst, accused of terrorism. Her assignment was to discover what transformed the rich and privileged Patty into a gun-wielding bank-robber. Neveva, to complete this task, hires a young French-woman, Violette, who promptly renames herself Violaine. And as for the identity of our narrator, we discover only much later that she was a villager who retains vague childhood memories of the controversial Américaine and her profound influence on the impressionable nineteen-year-old Violaine. Our narrator refers to "les âmes flottantes"and"les identités mouvantes" (227) when discussing the kidnapped women studied in Neveva's Mercy Mary Patty, and these terms apply to the fluid characters in Lafon's novel of the same title as well. Time and plot in this novel are just as hard to grasp as the characters. Interspersed within Neveva and Violaine's research are translated transcriptions of real messages from Patty Hearst to her family and to the ruling class, which she abandoned to join her kidnappers in a radical fight for social equality. To these are added the narrator's memories of Violaine and her perceptions of the strange Neveva. Neveva touched the young Violaine who, in turn, touched the village girl who would become our narrator. And to complete the circle, this unnamed woman will search, forty years later at Smith College, for the true story of Patty Hearst and that of Professor Neveva herself. This novel prompts us to question the influence that we have over those who enter our sphere. Lafon asks, via her character: "[L]es rencontres sont-elles déterminantes?" (215). The answer here, which comes through our contact with Lafon and her novel, is a resounding "oui."