Lehane leaves thrillers behind in 'Given Day'
Dennis Lehane is the preeminent contemporary chronicler of Boston generally and the Boston Irish specifically. Because many of his books have featured the private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, he often is pigeonholed (i.e., condescended to) by the literati as a "genre novelist," but as he left no doubt in his shattering "Mystic River" (2001), he deserves to be included among the most interesting and accomplished American novelists of any genre.
Now, in "The Given Day," Lehane has done something brave and ambitious: He has written a historical novel. Immense in length and scope, it is set at the end of World War I, and it culminates in one of the most traumatic events in Boston's history, the policemen's strike of 1919. Meticulously researched and rich in period detail, it pulls the reader so rapidly through its complex story that it's easy to lose sight of its shortcomings.
The novel is so densely populated that Lehane provides a Cast of Characters, a list to which I resorted more than a few times, not merely to keep things straight but to distinguish between which characters are fictitious and which are historical. The latter fall into two groups: those connected to baseball, most notably Babe Ruth, and those with roles in government and law enforcement.
As his readers are aware, Lehane is at times as much social critic as novelist, especially with regard to race and class. Though the central character of "The Given Day" is a Boston Irish cop named Danny Coughlin, an African American named Luther Laurence plays almost as important a role.
The novel opens with a somewhat peculiar prologue in which the central figure is Babe Ruth. The 1918 World Series is under way, and the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox are on a train together when the engineer is forced to stop for repairs. Ruth wanders over to a field where black men are playing baseball - one of them is Luther Laurence - and eventually gets into the game. Things go well until other white players join in.
This is the first of several set pieces sprinkled throughout the book in which Ruth is central. The idea seems to be to contrast his self-centered naiveté with the harsh realities of the world. It doesn't work. Nothing would have been lost by eliminating these sections.
The stories of Danny Coughlin and Luther Laurence are plenty strong enough on their own. Danny is police department "royalty, the son of Captain Thomas Coughlin of Precinct 12 in South Boston and the godson of Special Squads Lieutenant Eddie McKenna." His father embodies two of the force's dominant strains, strength and graft. Danny has his father's strength but his inner core is kinder. He is in love with Nora O'Shea, an immigrant from Ireland whom his father brought into the family household as a domestic worker, but their romance is complicated by tensions and misunderstandings.
Luther has come to Boston after fleeing Tulsa. Eventually, he is hired by Thomas Coughlin to work as houseman. He befriends both Nora and Danny, setting up a racial triangle decidedly unusual for its time and place and not, in fact, entirely convincing.
As his friendship with Luther suggests, Danny is an uncommon Boston Irishman. He is loyal to his clan but not supinely so. When he thinks about his father as faithful to "the good," doubts come to his mind:
"The question remained, as it had throughout Danny's life, as to what exactly the good was. It had something to do with loyalty and something to do with the primacy of a man's honor. - It was above all, as far as Danny understood it, committed to the idea that those who exemplified the good in public were allowed certain exemptions as to how they behaved in private."
What Danny sees in "the good" is self-serving hypocrisy, and he rebels against it.
It all climaxes in 1919 when the police walk off the job and Boston collapses into anarchy. It's a powerful moment in history, and Lehane makes the most of it.
"The Given Day"
Author: Dennis Lehane
Publisher: Morrow, $27.95