by Dennis Lehane ★★★★★
Small Mercies is a novel set against the historical backdrop of Boston in the summer of 1974. Courts have recently ordered the desegregation of a small handful of Boston public schools and will commence busing students between, effectively, poor black neighborhoods and poor white ones. One of those poor white neighborhoods, South Boston (or "Southie"), is at the center of the story.
Southie is a tight-knit community. It's not just mostly white; it's 100% white, made up almost exclusively of Irish-American, blue-collar working-class people. There is also a fierce pride and almost neighborhood jingoism when it comes to mixing with other neighborhoods, and especially with other races. The Irish mob is at the heart of the community, and Southie prefers to take care of its own business. They don't mix with other neighborhoods, and they never involve the police.
The main protagonist is a woman named Mary Pat Fennessey. Mary Pat grew up in the Southie projects, and at 42 is a single mother working multiple jobs to try to keep food on the table for her and her 17-year-old daughter, Jules. Mary Pat's life has been hard. Her first husband died, and her second husband left her. She lost her only son to a drug overdose, and so Jules is her world.
Outside of her soft spot for Jules, Mary Pat is rough and angry. A lifetime of difficulty growing up in the projects has left her heart hardened to the world, and each day is a struggle. If anyone does or says anything that might suggest offense, Mary Pat swiftly responds with anger and oftentimes violence. She is a fighter, and has been fighting her entire life. She is not someone you want to mess with.
With racial tensions running high because of the impending school busing program, a young black man, Auggie Williamson, is found dead on the train tracks in Southie. Mary Pat doesn't think much of it, but when her daughter Jules doesn't come home after being out that same night, Mary Pat starts to worry and ask around. And, it turns out, there are people who don't want her asking questions about Jules, or about the night Auggie Williamson died.
What follows is one woman's journey to find her daughter, coupled with Lehane's no-punches-pulled examination of the racial tensions in and around Boston at that time. While the school desegregation decision brought it out in the open, Lehane examines the way those segregationist and racist attitudes were created and fostered for decades in Southie and the surrounding Boston neighborhoods. Lehane was born in 1966 in Dorchester (which borders Southie), and his own experience living through that summer permeates the entire book. The dialogue, the attitudes and the motivations of the characters all come across as wholly authentic.
Mary Pat is a character I'll remember forever: a hard-nosed and fiercely determined combination of Liam Neeson from Taken and Keanu Reeves in John Wick, with a sprinkling of a Ben Affleck from Good Will Hunting (if he was depressed and angry all the time). I've read everything by Dennis Lehane, and I think this is his best book since 2001's Mystic River (and, quite possibly, his best ever). It's a compelling story, told over a tight 300 pages, and an early candidate for my Book of the Year.
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Previous Best of 2023: #5 - Still Life
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