Heather Newton's Novel Under the Mercy Trees

HEATHER NEWTON'S NOVEL UNDER THE MERCY TREES

Mon. July 16th, 2018

I read Heather Newton's novel Under the Mercy Trees a couple of years ago and loved it!  (As far as I know, she and I are not related.)  Recently I read excerpts from two book reviews of Under the Mercy Trees on Amazon.com. 

Both reviews quoted on Amazon emphasize the sad aspects of her novel.  But that’s not what hit me about it!  It has a happy ending.  The hero of the novel in my opinion is the state of North Carolina.  Newton portrays a North Carolina in which liberals and conservatives are trying to get along with each other, and partly succeeding.  The main character is gay; his family is rural conservative.  One reviewer seemed to complain that the main character didn’t come out of the closet with his family.  My response to that is that he came out plenty enough for a conservative state like North Carolina.  If your brother calls you candy-ass in North Carolina, you're pretty much out.

Now, the real North Carolina is probably not as wonderful as the fictional North Carolina of Newton’s novel.  But Heather Newton has a beautiful vision of my home state (and hers).  Another thing I wonder, is that the relationship between liberals and conservatives in North Carolina may be more frayed and edgy now than it was seven years ago when Newton published her novel.  If so, then this year, we need to keep on conducting this struggle to communicate with each other more than ever. 

I have a vision of a future war in which a liberal American soldier and a conservative American soldier are in foxholes next to each other.  I hope they will trust each other, and I hope they’ll even have a little understanding of where the other fellow is coming from. 

Contrary to what everybody else is saying and thinking, we are not playing a winner-take-all game in this country.  I’m not saying we can’t have a disaster of Biblical proportions in the United States.  I am saying that even if we do have a disaster of Biblical proportions -- then after it happens, the fundamental things about needing to try to understand each other will still apply.

Jesus’ saying at Luke 3:8 “God can make children for Abraham out of these stones” is a response to many terrifying disasters beginning with Jericho -- a response which looks at disasters from the perspective of a long time after they occur.  I am going to spell out one application of His saying for my readers: even if all of us liberals are killed in a war, God will create new liberals.  That is Jesus' precise meaning, and I trust I'm not making this world a more gruesome place by pointing that out.  As the song says, "I don't want it."  But that is the reason, why I predict that the fundamental things about us needing to try to understand each other will still be true a thousand years from now.

Frank Newton