{"id":4958,"date":"2023-04-24T05:19:04","date_gmt":"2023-04-24T12:19:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=4958"},"modified":"2023-04-24T05:19:04","modified_gmt":"2023-04-24T12:19:04","slug":"dennis-lehane-small-mercies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/dennis-lehane-small-mercies\/","title":{"rendered":"Dennis Lehane: Small Mercies"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Dennis Lehane writes like an angel.\u00a0 His prose, while not flashy, is still beautiful, even while he writes about racial hatred, drug addiction, beat downs and murders.\u00a0 Through his compelling way of creating character, he reaches in and gives your heart a squeeze, and I think he writes better than anyone about the highways of grief, loss and heartbreak.\u00a0 It\u2019s one of those miracles of empathy that only the most powerful of writers possess.<\/p>\n

While this story is a simple one, in one way, it\u2019s also full of complicated layers and wrong turns. It\u2019s very basically the story of a worried mother looking for her missing daughter.\u00a0 The mother, the tough as nails Mary Pat Fennessy, lives in South Boston in 1974, just as school busing is about to break the city into riots and protests.\u00a0 The kids from Southie will be bussed into the black area of Roxbury, and vice versa.\u00a0 Mary Pat\u2019s 17 year old daughter, Jules, is scheduled to be on the first bus.<\/p>\n

Mary Pat, separated from her husband, scrapes a living and exists in a grim public housing apartment, but as the book makes clear, this neighborhood is all she\u2019s ever known.\u00a0 She says good bye to Jules as she heads off on a date with her boyfriend, a stoner named Rum, and wakes up the next morning to discover that Jules has not returned.<\/p>\n

While at work, Mary Pat is distracted, but not yet full on worried.\u00a0 One of her co-workers, a black woman nicknamed Dreamy, hasn\u2019t turned up, and late in the day Mary Pat realizes that the young black man who fell to his death in front of a subway train must be Dreamy\u2019s son.\u00a0 She\u2019s lost a son herself, and while she wasn\u2019t close to the woman, feels her loss.\u00a0 But as one day of her daughter\u2019s disappearance turns into two and then three, her worry increases and she\u2019s on a mission to find out what happened.<\/p>\n

Lehane writes brutally about the racism that permeated South Boston.\u00a0 The idea that a young black man was in a white Southie subway station is a microcosm of that racism, a death that does in fact turn out to be what we would today recognize as a hate crime.\u00a0 The hatreds and polarization Lehane writes about in 1974 Boston seem still very sadly familiar today.<\/p>\n

As Mary Pat digs into her daughter\u2019s disappearance, the story reveals the layers of the way the neighborhood is run by a mob and the man who runs the mob is untouchable.\u00a0 It has a real feel of Scorcese\u2019s film The Departed<\/em> (or maybe The Departed<\/em> has the feel of a Dennis Lehane novel).\u00a0 But Mary Pat is an avenging, and fearless, death angel who has nothing to lose and fears no mob boss.<\/p>\n

The violence that concludes this novel, as in any Lehane novel, is operatic.\u00a0 It suits the scope and scale of his storytelling which is both intimate and epic.\u00a0 The topic is epic; the intimate nature of one woman\u2019s story of grief and loss and search for revenge and justice makes you connect with what\u2019s happening.\u00a0 What could easily have been a polemic about racism and busing becomes instead a skillful dissection of both a certain place and a certain time, highlighted by Mary Pat’s very specific and relentless grief.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t say this was a pleasant read, with its graphic depiction of drug abuse, racial hatred, grief and violence, but it was a read I could neither look away from or forget once I finished reading it.\u00a0 From a writer like Dennis Lehane, I expected nothing less.\u00a0 —\u00a0Robin Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dennis Lehane writes like an angel.\u00a0 His prose, while not flashy, is still beautiful, even while he writes about racial hatred, drug addiction, beat downs and murders.\u00a0 Through his compelling way of creating character, he reaches in and gives your heart a squeeze, and I think he writes better than anyone about the highways of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1169,1173,990,10,1174,1172,1170,1171],"class_list":["post-4958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-dennis-lehane","tag-drug-use","tag-harper","tag-historical","tag-racism","tag-school-busing","tag-small-mercies","tag-south-boston-1974"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4958"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4968,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4958\/revisions\/4968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}