Go to the mobile version of this Web site.

Login | Contact Us | Site Map | Paid archives | Alerts | Electronic edition | Advertise | Subscribe to the paper | Today's Extras

Breaking News:

Subscribe

Lehane reaches new heights in sprawling new novel

'Mystic' author reaches new heights in ambitious novel about 1919 strike

By Clayton Moore, Special To The News

Published October 2, 2008 at 7 p.m.

Text size  

More Books

More stories »

Dennis Lehane has learned a few things in his time. The Boston-bred writer brings all of his influences to bear in The Given Day, a gritty historical novel that that firmly cements the writer's literary reputation, exploits his cinematic acuity and delivers on the weighty promises of a novel Lehane calls his "great white whale."

Best known for the grim morality play, Mystic River, and its Oscar-nominated screen adaptation directed by Clint Eastwood, Lehane cut his teeth with fluid crime novels like Gone, Baby, Gone, centered on a pair of detectives based in his old stomping grounds in Dorchester. More recently, he broadened his scope by writing episodes for HBO's The Wire, short stories (Coronado) and another novel, Shutter Island.

In one of the fall's most eagerly anticipated titles (already headed for screens with director Sam Raimi), Lehane mounts his biggest production to date with a sprawling but self-assured novel that embraces his working-class roots, his father's staunch pro-union worldview and two of his hometown's great tragedies.

The lion's share of the book tracks the bloody Boston police strike of 1919, while a stylish but superfluous parallel subplot mourns the loss of Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees the same year. As Lehane grapples with political clashes and the social forces that drive men to violence, he uses the developing metropolis as a prism through which to question our own times.

A large cast of characters both real and imagined populates Lehane's Boston, but two fiercely independent men tower above his dense landscape. Danny Coughlin is a 27-year-old Irish-American beat cop born into proletarian royalty, a member of a police force dominated by his father, Capt. Thomas Coughlin, and his brother Connor, an assistant district attorney. Danny's counterpart is a black numbers runner, Luther Laurence, destined to cross paths not only with Danny, but also with Ruth, whom Luther meets during a hastily-arranged rural ball game in the prologue.

As the novel opens, Danny is recruited by his partner into the Boston Social Club, a loose organization of officers Danny initially ridicules as a "boy's club," but which he slowly grows to appreciate as it evolves into an uncompromising police union. Danny is also tasked by his father's circle to infiltrate the Bolshevik-oriented anarchist movement that is using such radical tactics as bombings and assassinations to inspire the working class and strike fear in the city fathers.

Heightening his tension is Danny's unrequited desire for his brother's fiancee, Nora O'Shea, who has been disgraced by the sudden reappearance of the Irish husband she abandoned.

Though uneasy with his assignment, Danny develops a firm grasp of the revolutionary rhetoric and stumbles into an affair with Tessa Abruzze, who emerges as the devious, murderous daughter of a revolutionary leader.

"This silly big country," she says, scornful of the emerging bourgeoisie. "You Americans - there is no history. There is only now. Now, now, now. I want this now. I want that now."

Meanwhile, Luther faces his own demon in Tulsa gangster Deacon Skinner Broscious, who demands unwavering loyalty just as Luther's wife, Lila, reveals she's pregnant. Backed into a corner after his best friend is murdered before his eyes, Luther shoots the gangster stone dead but leaves a vengeful henchman named Smoke alive. "You brought this on yourselves," Luther murmurs, fleeing to Boston. There, Luther goes to work for the Coughlin family, befriends Danny and faces down Danny's malevolent godfather, a crooked cop named Eddie McKenna.

In his new role as one of the union's leaders, Danny chafes against a callous bureaucracy that includes Gov. Calvin Coolidge, newly minted Police Commissioner Stephen O'Meara and young Department of Justice lawyer John Hoover. He rages over the inhumane working conditions of his comrades, including unsanitary station houses, poverty-level wages and a criminal company store policy. Wracked with despair, Danny comes to know the bitter fury that inspires those burning his city around him.

"In the war, they'd died by the millions. For nothing but real estate," Lehane writes. "And now, in the streets of the world, the same battle continued. Today, Boston. Tomorrow, someplace else. The poor fighting the poor. As they'd always done. As they were encouraged to."

Lehane's philosophical ruminations sound a bit contrived out of context, but they blend easily enough amidst an epic, graphic conflict that pits classes, institutions and families against each other. Danny believes that change is coming, but his friend Luther takes a far less rose-colored view of their moral dilemmas.

"World ain't changing," replies Luther. "Ain't never going to, neither. They tell you the sky's green until you finally say, 'Okay, the sky's green?' Then they own the sky, Danny, and everything underneath it."

As the city boils toward its inevitable conflagration, these noble men are left with choices that may save them or doom them.

The novel is an admirable stride forward for Lehane, who acknowledges that such radical social change is never easy and yet casts a cynical eye toward a government that would manipulate society for its own purposes. It's a complex view that recognizes that the world dragged forward is never the same as the one left behind. Here's hoping the novelist's own march towards progress continues unabated.

Clayton Moore is a freelance writer in Colorado.

Sequel in mind

Lehane recently told USA Today that he may write a sequel to The Given Day set partly during a 1921 race riot in Tulsa, when white mobs ruined a prosperous black neighborhood. "It was the third worst act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history," behind 9/11 and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Lehane said, adding that he hasn't decided yet if "a white guy has anything original to say (about it)."

The Given Day

* By Dennis Lehane. William Morrow, 720 pages, $27.95.

* Grade: A

Post your comment

Registration is required. Click here to create your free user account, or login below.

Comments are the sole responsibility of the person posting them. You agree not to post comments that are off topic, defamatory, obscene, abusive, threatening or an invasion of privacy. Violators may be banned. Click here for our full user agreement.




(Forgotten your password?)




News Tip

Know about something we should be reporting? Tell us about it.

Sponsored links



Reprints