john's thoughts

“Small Mercies” by Dennis Lehane, Copywright 2023, Harper Collins, 299 pgs

It is not easy, at first anyway, to classify Dennis Lahane as a writer. He’s not quite a mystery writer though his books are often whodunits of a sort along with other things. “Crime writer” would likely be a better description because he nearly always writes about crime. I doubt if many of the chairmen of English Departments at US universities would accept him as a serious writer, worthy of being taught in their courses. But they would be making a big mistake.

Lehane is most of all a tough guy writer. He is reminiscent of the “hard-boiled”school of bygone times, writers like James M Cain. But I think he’s better though it is hard exactly to say why. I guess it’s because he is a genre writer and yet transcends genre writing. Now I imagine what I just wrote is a cliche but cliches are sometimes true and I am willing to stand by this one.

Lehane has the ability to look into the human heart and soul and to describe what he sees there. He sees both good and evil, mostly the latter, but the good not to be ignored or despised. And he is, at bottom, I think, a guy who pulls for the good guys but thinks they usually lose. Maybe be we could call it realism, but therein hangs a long argument which I don’t want to have right now.

Whatever, I think Lehane is way beyond the minimum for being taken as a serious writer. He knows the heights and depths of human hearts and souls but he also knows the byways and nuances of US society, particularly the working class of the big cities and most particularly the poor of the Boston area. What his personal history and background are I don’t know, but he is obviously familiar with these people and their ways and while he does not suggest anyone emulate them he does not despise them. He understands the pain and meaninglessness many of them have to deal with and he knows most of them will not make it out to a wider world. But he will tell his readers about them and celebrate their gritty heroism, nonetheless.

“Small Mercies” is supposedly about the bitter protests and resistance that occurred during the busing/integration controversy of September, 1974. And, indeed, this is true. The company saw that it got a cover that suggests this subject and the inside flap mentions that there is the busing controversy and there is a crime which seems unrelated. But the two, it continues are not unconnected.

All of this is true, but it misses a serious issue. The book is about Mary Pat Fennessy and her world, the people she knows, the things she does, the life she leads. Because it describes this life in detail, it is also about the “Southie” area of Boston where all the trouble was. But the book is more about Mary Pat than it is about integration and social protest.

Please don’t get me wrong. The busing controversy is always there in the background. Knowledge of it hangs over most of the characters much of the time and the reader’s mind just about all the time. But this is a book about a person, Mary Pat, more than it is about social events, protests, etc, important as they are. And Mary Pat is, I think, one of the great characters of American literature.

OK, I’m not qualified to say that. I’m a one-time bureaucrat and history teacher and a big time mystery and movie fan-definitely not a literary scholar. So I guess you’ll have to check it out yourself to see if you agree with me about Mary Pat. I hope that you will.(By the way, Lehane chose to tell this story entirely in the present tense–an odd choice, maybe, but I’d say a good one–it worked).

Mary Pat is not an entirely good person–far from it. She is in her early 40’s, has had two failed marriages and two children. The boy was a Vietnam Vet(remember, this is mid-1970’s)who survived combat in the war and died of the drug culture at home. His sister is 16 or 17 and a high school student. Mary Pat works as an aide in a retirement home, not a very nice one, and gets the worst and most off-putting jobs most of the time. She basically hates the work but has no other choice. She makes enough to hold together her fragile two-person household.

Mary Pat is not an attractive person in many ways. She sounds not particularly physically attractive from Lehane’s description. She is intelligent but poorly educated. She has tastes that, mostly, would be equal to those of working class housewives in the poorer parts of a lot of American cities. He language is crass and often confrontational. She uses profanity and vulgarity frequently in a manner that will be familiar to anyone who has experienced certain parts of our society or even read much about them.

So we see the surface of what kind of person we have here–a crude person, an unsophisticated person, not an interesting person. This is a person you or I would not wish to hang out with. You wouldn’t want her at your party. I certainly wouldn’t want her at mine. And I don’t think either one of us has to be ashamed of this. At the risk of sounding like a conservative, there is little question that people from the middle class on up are usually more pleasant to be around(not always more moral, not always more trustworthy, not necessarily less given to nastiness and betrayal, but nicer–and I am middle class enough myself to recognized a certain value in that.)

But Lehane has more in mind than this. Lehane is interested in that real person, that genuine personality and soul that lurks inside all human beings and in many cases is rarely revealed to others. He is interested in what drives people to certain behaviors and what allows certain regrettable behaviors. And he is stingy with the answers as he should be, because Truth is stingy with them to anyone who asks.

But Lehane tries. He digs into Mary Pat’s deepest feelings and lays them bare for all of us to see. They are not always joyful(usually not)but they are honestly displayed. Most of all they are human, and humans are complicated and usually contradictory and often screwed up in one way or another.. And so is Mary Pat.

Early in the story, Mary Pat’s daughter disappears on a date. Mary Pat is concerned but not exactly panicky at first. But as more time passes she becomes more and more worried and begins to search and to imagine. At about the same time a young black man dies in a confrontation with some whites at a station. It appears that this might be connected to the busing quarrel or at least affected by the feelings it engendered. It is also possible that Mary Pat’s daughter was involved.

So we follow Mary Pat as she tries to find out what happened to her daughter and encounters reminders of the big community concern on they way. And we may get some feeling for the concept, that when you see a crowd of people protesting or supporting something, it is good to remember that the crowd is made up of individuals, each with their own story, and this is a large part of what they bring with them

We see many things in Mary Pat. She is loud and abrasive. She is fiercely protective of her daughter. She is often foul mouthed and willing to fight, verbally if not physically. But she is not averse to physical combat if it comes to that, and in one memorable scene she dishes out a vicious beating on a boy whom she blames for her daughter’s plight.

But we also note this. There is great love in Mary Pat. It has often been misused and abused, by her family, her two husbands, and others, but it is still there and is now centered on Jules, her daughter. This love is, in the long run, the main thing in her personality or, to put it more dramatically and possibly also more realistically, in her heart. It is responsible for her occasional rages and words of contempt. It is responsible for her deep grief and regrets. And to some degree it is responsible for another large part of her, her capacity for hate and revenge. For she is a person who does not easily forgive and forget. She will hold it against one and track one down if necessary.

Occasionally Mary Pat has a memory intrude on her troubles. She thinks of something from high school, or another part of her youth She thinks of some of the good times early in one of her marriages. And although it is impossible to imagine a fond smile coming to this woman’s lips, maybe something like that happens inside her–and then quickly goes away.

Mary Pat is also courageous. And this brings us to the one other motif of the book. There is always, at least in the background and sometimes much closer, the mob. The mob apparently ran Boston or at least most of Southie.

They control many small businesses. They commit mayhem when they need to and through bribery or trickery usually get away with it. They are relentless in tracking their enemies or anyone who has betrayed them. If you live in Southie you know this and you learn to get along. Mary Pat has learned but is not happy with the lesson and in the end not accepting of it.

There is also a small part in the book for the police. they are not in it a great deal, but they are portrayed a beleaguered but-as far as we meet them–mostly honest–they know they can’t take down all the big bad guys, but they’ll do what they can do. And Bobby Coyne, a youngish police detective with a sense of both reality and justice, is one of the book’s best characters.

But Mary Pat is the main person and the main thing in the story. Mary Pat as Everyman(woman?)or as least everyone in Southie, or perhaps all American cities or perhaps…well, take that as far as you wish. You might just be right.

Lehane is too complex and sophisticated of a writer to insult us with a simple “there’s good and bad in all of us.” It is not, of course, that that is not true. It is that it is a simple-sounding idea that gives us a longing for a deeper explanation. And while some of these things are beyond reasonable explanation Lehane does do this in his own way.

About the last 30 pages of this book are very suspenseful and very fast moving .These are the “action’ parts where we actually witness a good deal of the violence that occurs between Mary Pat and others. And it is in these that Lehane reaches his ultimate as a writer and an observer of human nature as we get brief, frenzied, often hateful and yet curiously understanding conversation between victims and victimizer.

And we see that in some weird, contradictory way that they all have an “I” hiding in there somewhere, maybe a lousy one, but an “I” all the same. They all have a soul and a personality and something of that sort has at some time had thoughts about existence.. The thoughts were not very sophisticated or well expressed, even to themselves, but they were there. And there is a strange kind of comfort in this, I think, in knowing that even in human monsters, there is some level of humanity, maybe long since inactive, maybe useless as a source of behavior, but stubbornly there despite it all.

And possibly this is the final message, if there is one. Lehane’s prose is so well done and his thoughts flow so sublimely in this end part that this book approaches being poetry. It’s not the kind you’d find in a poetry class, but I think that’s still what it is. It is the poetry of despair and hope, of joy and sadness, of decency and violence–the poetry of how it all fits together and tells about the mean streets so many people face–like the literal mean streets of Southie or the metaphorical ones of, well, nearly everyone somewhere. And in this hectic, frenzied way, there is a great deal to be learned about what needs to be done and perhaps could be done by our society. But there’s also, a smidgen of hope. It lurks somewhere in the human heart, the part of it that can’t be cured by medicine or diet or anything physical. It can only be cured by other sources.