SOURCE: "Nasties," in Times Literary Supplement, October 5, 1990, p. 1072.

In the following review, Heller offers unfavorable assessment of Mercy.

In 1983, Andrea Dworkin gave a speech to students at Hamilton College in upstate New York. "I represent the morbid side of the women's movement", she began. "I deal with the shit, the real shit." Seven years on, Dworkin's commitment to the dirty work of feminism shows no signs of letting up. "The shit"—or more specifically, the physical abuse of women by men—is still her specialization.

Her second novel, Mercy, is the story of Dworkin's alter-ego, "Andrea", a young woman whose journey through the misogynist world ("this zoo of sickies and sadists") constitutes an almost encyclopaedic survey of male sexual violence. Andrea begins her first-person narrative with an account of being assaulted in a cinema at the age of nine. Adolescence is french-kissing dirty old men on buses, and...