Epic America

Dennis Lehane Allows Us The Given Day

By John Hood

Of America’s crime scribes, no single writer, perhaps, is more identified with a city than is Dennis Lehane and his beloved Boston. In fact, when you consider such stunning slices of neo-Noir as Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone, it’s almost as if the man has written into his town legends that are bigger than the city itself.

Thing is, Lehane’s always been more than your garden-variety genre writer. Sure, each of his seven previous efforts is steeped in the deep, dark underbelly of the criminal element, but all probe far beyond any atypical yarn about good guys and bad guys. To Lehane, a case seems simply a manner in which to get to the heart and the soul of the matter at hand — that is, the what and the why and the how of who we are.

So it stands to good reason that Lehane’s latest, The Given Day (William Morrow $27.95), not only concerns itself with the city of his birth, but it rides the undercurrents which give it its beat. What might surprise you, is that it does so with a scope and a sweep that surpasses anything Lehane has ever done before — and that’s saying something.

Set at the Great War’s end, amid a city teeming with tensions of race, economy, politics and identity, The Given Day tells the story of the Coughlins, a lace-curtain Irish family hell-bent on coming to terms with the New World, no matter what the cost. Father Thomas is a captain in the Boston Police Department, a position that is not without its many privileges — chief among them being helping to determine the fate of the city itself. Unfortunately, daddy’s determination is in direct opposition to son Danny’s desires, which have everything to do with the shield he too carries, but nothing at all to do with the status quo his father would have him adhere to. And, Danny boy not only sees the new day a dawning, he’s set to seize it.

Enticed to go undercover and infiltrate the increasingly growing radical underground, Danny discovers that the men he’s been coerced to investigate aren’t the evil enemies BPD brass has made them out to be. If anything, they’re just working men looking for a fair shake.

So too the cops, who remain working at pre-War poverty wages, in conditions that no man should ever have to stand for (especially one who’s sworn to protect and to serve). When the cops begin to organize, the powers-that-be start to worry, until the opposing forces collide in what would come to be known as the Boston Police Strike.

Countering the white man’s weight is one Luther Laurence, a black munitions worker who’s fled his adopted Tulsa after murdering a gangster, and has now found himself employed in the Coughlin household. This being early 20th-century America, where even in New England men of color remained fully segregated, it’s the kind of job that could get a cat in a whole heap of trouble.

And trouble does come, first because of his friendship with Danny, and then from the captain’s old friend, Eddie McKenna, whose hatred is as evil as it is gratuitous. When McKenna pushes Laurence to set up the NAACP-founding folk who’ve taken him in, the trouble gets compounded, and then it doubles back on itself.

Noting its stirring blend of fact and fiction, critics have already compared The Given Day to E.L. Doctorow’s magnificent Ragtime, another work which bolsters its story with some of history’s most pivotal players and events.

But whereas Doctorow seemed intent on retribution and Dos Passos seemed bent on the bleak, Lehane sees in his people a hope that is at once simple and pure. As the man himself states so succinctly toward the end of this great American epic: “[He] finally found a word for this day... Whole.”

Dennis Lehane will attend the Miami International Book Fair on Nov. 15th. Visit miamibookfair.com for more information.

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