Reading a Dennis Lehane novel is no walk in the park. It is if your park is filled with intrigue, betrayal, revenge, murder, drug overdoses, child abuse, and race riots. You get all of that in his latest novel, “Small Mercies.” It’s a harrowing ride through the Boston South End we read about in “Mystic River,” "Shutter Island," and the Kenzie-Gennaro mystery series (“Gone, Baby, Gone”).
The setting is the very hot end of summer in 1974
Boston. Americans are on edge due to the Saudi oil embargo. Lehane writes that
everyone was driving around with at least a half-tank of gas so they didn’t
have to spend their time in long gas lines. But there’s a bigger issue in the
mostly-white areas of the city: court-ordered busing. Some of the
Irish-American kids are going to be bused to a formerly all-black high school
in a black neighborhood. Black children will be bused into all-white South End
schools. The setting is about as territorial as it gets and a bomb is set to go
off.
That bomb is Mary Pat Fennessey. She’s a native of the
Southie projects, daughter of an abused household who passes on some of that
abuse to her own family. One husband has been killed and the second one is
estranged. Her son Noel returned from Vietnam with a habit and he dies from an
overdose. Mary Pat only has her 17-year-old daughter Jules. Jules goes out with
friends one night and doesn’t come home. A young black man has been murdered
and Jules and her friends were somehow involved. Everyone tells Mary Pat to be
patient, her daughter will turn up, you know how kids are. But Mary Pat has
been pushed too far this time. Irish mobsters try to buy her silence and that
tells her one thing: her daughter is dead because she’s witnessed a murder and
someone is going to pay. Many someones pay dearly at Mary Pat’s hand.
Lehane does a wonderful job weaving Mary Pat’s vengeance
with rowdy anti-busing rallies, the oil embargo, and the poverty and dysfunction of
Irish-American Boston. The author takes us on a tour of neighborhoods and the
entire city. Even Sen. Ted Kennedy makes an appearance. This is what is
happening in Boston in August and September 1974.
The scene seems eerily familiar to a reader in 2023. Lehane makes class resentment very
clear through the eyes of his characters. The inner-city white Boston
neighborhoods have sent more kids to Vietnam than almost any other place in
America. Most young men get drafted because they work menial jobs and do not
have college deferments like all those kids across the river in Cambridge. When
Mary Pat visits Harvard to seek help from her campus janitor ex-husband, you
feel her disdain for the hippies in the city and the privileged white students
protesting the war which won’t be declared over for another year.
If all of this sounds familiar, it is. These class
resentments have been buildings for decades and politicians and media blowhards
on the Right have tapped into it. It’s sad, and the book is sad. It’s a
personal story. You feel Mary Pat’s rage in your gut and this reader is both
shocked and saddened by her vendetta.
I lived in Boston 1972-73. I missed the fireworks of
1974. If I had been paying attention, I might have felt the city’s aching
heart. Dennis Lehane’s gift to us is we get to feel what it was like to live in
the Boston of almost 50 years ago. One hell of a story.
I looked at “Small Mercies” as a historical novel. It’s
still a rough place in 2023. Real estate web site Upgraded Home talked listed
Boston’s 10 most dangerous neighborhoods. South End – Southie -- was number
three.
Our advice? If you find yourself in South End, keep an eye out for thieves, don’t get into arguments with people who just came from the local bars, and get a security system for your home.
And then there’s this from a recent
issue of Boston Magazine:
In the last few decades, the South End has rapidly gentrified, once again becoming one of the city’s most stylish neighborhoods.
Mary Pat might not recognize the place. Then
again, she might.
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