Have Mercy on Us by Lisa Cupolo Review by K.K. Fox

Have Mercy on Us
by Lisa Cupolo

Review by K.K. Fox

Genre: Short Story Collection

Publication Date: January 24, 2023

Page Count: 144 pages

ISBN:  978-1646033164

Have Mercy on Us by Lisa Cupolo is a debut collection that tickles your fascination impulse like a good round of gossip. You sit up a little, lean in closer. Often, we read fiction with curiosity, wanting to know how a story will turn out, what will become of the characters, but Cupolo’s stories push our curiosity into nosiness. From the very first story, Cupolo evokes an almost voyeuristic urge, an inability to look away from scandal.

“Felt and Left Have the Same Letters” is about Daria, a wife of many years who recognizes her husband’s thinly veiled lust for another woman. The story makes you squirm as you wonder how Daria is going to negotiate her infuriating options. Neither the husband nor the other woman operates with any smidge of subtlety. It nearly deserves a trigger warning for anyone who finds they are the suspicious or jealous type.  

I started reading the collection, and therefore the first story, on a plane, and I was so agitated that I recorded my reaction in a journal. I wrote of the main character: “She does not, as I would, stick a finger hook in his cheek and roll him down a hill.” I wanted to throttle the husband, and I’m not sure the last time I felt the urge to throttle a character.  

It was serendipitous that I started reading the collection on a plane because the lovely cover art evokes geography, flight, travel. That’s largely because the stories span a lot of ground, taking place in settings such as Florida, Canada, and Kenya. Cupolo’s stories are told from various points of view, including one of Nora Zeale Hurston, working a job cleaning hotel rooms despite already having literary success. There is an eclectic coffee klatch that serves as an informal group therapy, a pair of middle-aged best friends who decide to buy a house together and forget about men, and a mother who cannot stop herself from stalking the father of her grandchild. A consistent theme across much of this thematic and global expanse, however, is that of family and what a complicated word that is. We so often see our own family members as a mother first, woman second. Father first, man second. But Have Mercy on Us explores what happens when that first layer erodes.

In “You’re Here Now,” the reader learns that Sylvie, the narrator, had no relationship with her father, that she never even met him, even though she knew exactly who he was, living in the very same town with a family full of legitimate children. Sylvie’s mother made a deliberate decision not to include the father in their lives, even driving Sylvie to the next town over to have a dental checkup since her birth father was the local dentist. Upon the father’s untimely death, Sylvie defies her mother’s wishes and makes contact with her half-siblings. The story draws you through the ugly side of human reactions and leaves you wondering about the rules of loyalty. 

In “Long Division,” a father flies to Kenya in order to ask his son for help. He hopes the son will come help his sister, who is struggling with her mental health. Or better said, he assumes that the son will come help, thanks to conventional expectations of family. However, when the father arrives, he notes, “I realize that I’m seeing my son as he is in the world, with no reference to me at all.” Family is often taken for granted as an extension of our own identities. There are loads of modern-day therapists dealing with the messy consequences of this error. Quickly, the father is met by his son’s resistance to return to the States. The father then sees the mirrored reflection of his previous observation: “It comes to me that in his mind I am more outsider than father.”

In “How I Became a Banker,” a drunken father tells his twelve-year-old daughter, Lydia, he loves her before passing out. The daughter then must “wrestle him onto the couch,” a role reversal of child and parent. These moments do not come without cost, and as she covers her father with a blanket, she states, “I stood above looking at him, understanding that in the real and practical world, my father was not a good man.” 

This raises the question: what world was she living in if not real and practical? Cupolo illustrates these two different worlds for the reader by her narrative use of the “double I.” This occurs when a narrator tells a story about their childhood and refers to their current age as well as the younger age that the significant event(s) took place. 

Lydia starts the story of “How I Became a Banker” by establishing “I made a promise to myself when I was twelve that no matter what, I’d make a shitload of money. I was a third of the age I am now[…]” That means Lydia is telling this story from the age of 36. She can make sense of the experience from outside of it, but she can also take the reader through its impact at the time. Two different worlds – inside childhood and beyond it. However, Sylvie in “You’re Here Now” may articulate it best when she says, “Yes, my mother took care of everything. I didn’t even know I resented her for it; it was just the air I breathed.” 

Does life get better, though, moving from one of these worlds to another? On the one hand, Daria, in the very first story, says, “Age deepens a person’s wisdom.” So many of us cling to the notion of wisdom as healing. And yet, in the next breath, Daria says, “We were not that ancient, of course. We were in our late sixties but the rules still applied. Life continued to swirl, round and round again.” 

The rules still apply. Life continues to swirl. Of course it does. Of course it does. 

Have mercy. 

Have Mercy on Us won the W.S. Porter Prize for Regal House Publishing.

Lisa Cupolo has been a paparazzi photographer, an aid worker in Kenya, a script doctor in LA, and a literary publicist at HarperCollins in Toronto. Her stories have been published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Narrative, The Idaho Review, and others. She holds a BA in Philosophy from The University of Western Ontario, a graduate degree in Portrait Photography from The London Institute, and an MFA from the University of Memphis. She has lived all over the world, but currently resides in Southern California, where she teaches fiction writing at Chapman University.

K.K. Fox lives in Nashville, TN where she teaches writing and literature at Austin Peay State University. Her fiction has appeared in Iron Horse, Joyland, Kenyon Review Online, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. She is a fiction editor for Los Angeles Review. 

3 May 2023