Book Report: Small Mercies

23. Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies (2023) (11/19/23)

I'm not sure I've ever read Dennis Lehane before, though I've seen a couple of his books rendered as movies (Mystic River and Shutter Island; the films Gone Baby Gone and Live by Night are two that I haven't seen). This book was mentioned in a recent list of "best mysteries/detective stories" or some such, and I was curious, so I bit. 

It's an excellent book, but also very harsh, in part because the events depicted, set in 1974 South Boston, feel in some ways like they are happening today still. Different details, but same hatreds and power plays. We just don't change, do we?

The backdrop is the impending enforcement of anti–school segregation laws, which will mean the busing of students between all-white Southie and all-Black Roxbury. Tensions are high as a rally approaches and residents of working-class, largely Irish South Boston prepare to make their voices heard. Racism is rampant—tribalism and rage.

Against this, a twenty-year-old Black man is found dead under a train station platform—an accident?—and a seventeen-year-old girl goes missing. The girl's passionate, ferocious mother goes looking for answers—straight into the serpent's den of the local Irish mafia. But she has nothing left to lose: her second husband, Ken Fennessy, recently left her, and her son, Noel, OD'ed on heroin not too long ago. Now, to lose her daughter, Jules, is too much. She does, however, find the sympathetic ear of a police detective from a nearby Irish enclave. And she begins to make progress in her search for the truth.

I won't say more than that about the plot. What Lehane does so well is to create a vivid portrait of that place in that time, of the passions roiling just beneath the surface, ready to burst into flames—literally. (It doesn't help that it's summer and stinking hot.) He also lets us into the nuanced existences of the main characters—especially Mary Pat, the girl's mother, and the detective, Bobby Coyne—slowly and deftly, revealing sides that you might not have suspected, or that simply wouldn't have existed in a less able writer's telling. And the way the facts keep twisting and turning, until finally the truth is revealed: masterful.

I flagged various passages for the sharp writing, such as this, about a boy Jules hung out with:

"I don't give two shits what he [Jules's boyfriend] told you," George Dunbar says to her half an hour later. "It isn't true."
     [Mary Pat] looks at this handsome kid with his smooth demeanor and his heartless eyes who sold her son his own death in a little plastic baggie. He stares back at her with a gaze so flat and stripped of emotion it would look weird on a Ken doll.
     George was a part of the fabric of the Fennessy household for about ten years, always running in and out with Noel; in all that time, she never got a clear view of him. It was as if a part of him, a core part, wasn't there when you went looking for it. She mentioned this to Ken Fen once and he said, "Most people we know are like dogs—there's loyal ones, mean ones, friendly ones. But all of it, good and bad, comes from the heart."
     "What kind of dog is George Dunbar?"
     "None," Kenny said. "He's a fucking cat."

And here is Bobby Coyne thinking about the two people he's killed in his life, no more than boys—as was he, as an army corporal in Vietnam:

But he knew they were really dead because they were in the way. Of profit. Of philosophy. Of a worldview that said rules apply only to the people who aren't in charge of making them.
     Call them gooks, call them niggers, call them kikes, micks, spics, wops, or frogs, call them whatever you want as long as you call them something—anything—that removes one layer of human being from their bodies when you think of them. That's the goal. If you can do that, you can get kids to cross oceans to kill other kids, or you can get them to stay right here at home and do the same thing.

And all that still goes on—and in some ways seems to be getting worse. Which is why this book left me feeling so unsettled. But I'm glad to have gotten to know Mary Pat (from a distance) and Bobby, and a few other characters as well, in all their pain and conflictedness, but also their striving hope.