ENTERTAINMENT

Toni Morrison has nothing left to prove to anyone. With a Nobel Prize and 77 years in hand, and a fervent following that traverses the line between Oprah and the academy, she could go gently into that good night of letters with her legacy secure.

But that would mean she has nothing left to offer, an idea debunked by the exquisite literary sketch that is A Mercy.

This certainly isn't Ms. Morrison's most ambitious work, and at 169 pages it's even shorter than her haunting novella of pariahs and scapegoats, 1974's Sula. But this compact package contains some of the author's most refined prose to date.

The language and structure are more vivid and accessible than her last two postmodern benders, Paradise and Love. And the story, a multicultural New World foray into the wilds of the 17th century, is both movingly inclusive and tragically prescient. This is Ms. Morrison in high humanist form, even if it ultimately feels a little slight and sawed-off.

The historical setting and themes of family division and fierce, otherworldly loyalty will draw comparison to Ms. Morrison's slavery masterpiece, Beloved. Where that novel redressed and mourned the peculiar institution and its impact on the family, A Mercy is more concerned with the creation and dissolution of an alternative clan of varying hues, the kind not uncommon in 21st-century America.

Though Ms. Morrison manages to play with various narrative strategies in the novel's minimal space, A Mercy's strongest voice (and its mercy) belongs to a headstrong black girl named Florens. She is the property of Jacob Vaark, a stoic Northern farmer and trader, and his wife, Rebekka, bedridden and waiting to perish like the heroine of As I Lay Dying, written by Ms. Morrison's literary role model William Faulkner.

Rebekka sends Florens on a mission to find the blacksmith who could save her life. The catch: The blacksmith has already made off with Florens' heart.

If that sounds a little pat for Ms. Morrison, rest assured that she puts additional variables in play. The makeshift Vaark household also includes Lina, an American Indian servant who forms a womanly bond with Rebekka despite vast spiritual differences; Sorrow, a slave girl who thrives on chaos; and Willard and Scully, white slaves at the periphery of the action. Allegiances and resentments fly thick, standing, not always subtly, for America's thorny and formative roots.

You can go for hours in A Mercy without encountering a cliché. (Here's a rare one, as Rebekka confronts her death: "She could hear its hooves clacking on the roof, could see the cloaked figure on horseback.") More typical is the graceful description of Jacob and Rebekka's courtship: "They settled into the long learning of one another." Or Lina's take on New World arrivals, which deftly inverts the concept of "the other": "An unfathomable puzzle. Europes could calmly cut mothers down, blast old men in the face with muskets louder than moose calls, but were enraged if a not-Europe looked a Europe in the eye."

More than any other Morrison novel, A Mercy lays waste to the binary of black and white.

So there's much to embrace here. But it's hard not to wish for a lot more. With but 20 pages to go, Ms. Morrison is still doing character sketches (of Willard and Scully), creating a sort of reverse momentum and raising the most elemental of questions: Is that it? We're almost done and you're doing the dutiful profile thing?

It's a little frustrating. Then again, when you have nothing left to prove, perhaps you can start playing by your own rules.

A Mercy

Toni Morrison

(Knopf, $23.95)