For the crime novelist Dennis Lehane, southern Boston is a muse, but for his characters it’s more of a curse. Lehane grew up in Dorchester, the setting for his series of books featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, private detectives whose roots in the neighborhood help them solve cases. The best known of those books, “Gone, Baby, Gone” (1998), was adapted for the screen by Ben Affleck in 2007. Kenzie and Gennaro know the local hoods and toughs because they went to school with them. When the pair need muscle, they call on their sociopathic and improbably loyal buddy, Bubba Rogowski, also a former classmate, who sells illegal weapons, lives in a warehouse surrounded by booby traps, and comically terrifies everyone else.
But series fiction, in which our detectives must survive to investigate another day, can’t fully realize Lehane’s tragic vision of Boston’s working-class enclaves. It is his stand-alone novels—especially “Mystic River,” which appeared in 2001 and was made into a movie two years later by Clint Eastwood, and his most recent, “Small Mercies” (Harper)—that land like a fist to the solar plexus. They, too, are full of booby traps, but the metaphorical kind that blow up futures instead of limbs: negligent parents, busted marriages, dead-end jobs, booze, poverty, violence, resentment, and misdirected hate.
As Mary Pat Fennessy, the central character of “Small Mercies,” sees it, the people in her neighborhood are poor not because “they don’t try hard, don’t work hard, aren’t deserving of better things” but because “there’s a limited amount of good luck in this world, and they’ve never been given any.” At forty-two, with two husbands in the rearview mirror and a son who died of a heroin overdose, Mary Pat looks as if she “came off a conveyor belt for tough Irish broads.” A drinker but not a drunk, she works two jobs, which is still not enough to keep the gas company from cutting off service to the apartment she shares with her much loved seventeen-year-old daughter, Jules.
Mary Pat and Jules live in a housing project in South Boston—Southie, which you don’t want to conflate with nearby Dorchester when anyone from Boston is around. The novel, set half a century ago, has a character, a police detective named Bobby Coyne, who hails from a neighborhood in nearby Dorchester which was as white and Irish and working-class as Southie. He marvels that, despite all these similarities, crossing over to Southie makes him feel that he’s “just entered the rain forest of an unknowable tribe.” He’s never seen more people helping little old ladies to cross streets or to carry groceries. The neighbors all know one another, pride themselves on rallying to shovel snow from the sidewalks and uncover cars after a blizzard. “They’re the friendliest people he’s ever met,” Lehane writes. “Until they aren’t. At which point they’ll run over their own grandmothers to ram your fucking skull through a brick wall.”
The Southie of “Small Mercies” isn’t the gentrifying Southie of today. Lehane’s contemporary characters often fume about the “yuppies” taking over their neighborhoods, the gastropubs and fancy coffee shops supplanting the dive bars and pot-roast-scented taverns. But the novel takes place in the summer of 1974, when Southie made national headlines for rising up against the court-ordered desegregation of its public schools. In an author’s note, Lehane recalls the night his father took a wrong turn driving his family home and ran into an anti-busing protest. Ted Kennedy and the judge who’d ordered the desegregation were being burned in effigy, and the furious crowd rocked the Lehanes’ Chevy. “I’d never been so terrified in my life,” Lehane writes.
“Small Mercies” opens with Mary Pat receiving a visit from a representative of the local gang leader. A man with “eyes the color of Windex,” he’s one of those clean-cut, pseudo-civic-minded mobsters whose shakedowns come in the guise of requests for donations to the I.R.A. This time, however, his minion has a stack of leaflets for Mary Pat to distribute and some picket signs that need assembling. Even the criminals in Southie are mobilizing to protest the busing of Black children into the neighborhood’s schools and of local kids into the almost all-Black schools of Roxbury and Mattapan. Mary Pat herself is all in on the demonstration, outraged that Jules is “being forced—by federal edict—to enter a new school her senior year in a foreign neighborhood not known for letting white kids walk around after sundown.” She worries that Jules is too fragile for the neighborhood she already lives in. As Mary Pat’s mother used to say, “You’re either a fighter or a runner. And runners always run out of road.”
Mary Pat doesn’t think of herself as a racist. She scolded her kids for using racial slurs when referring to those “good, hardworking, upstanding Negroes” who simply “want the same things she wants.” She’s friendly with a Black co-worker at the nursing home where she has a job as an aide, although she admits that it’s never going to be the kind of friendship in which they’d exchange phone numbers. She tells herself that she’d be just as angry if the court had ordered her kid to take a crosstown bus ride to an all-white school, despite a nagging voice in the back of her mind that insists this isn’t really true. Then Jules goes missing on the night before a twenty-year-old Black man is found dead under a subway platform near Southie, and Mary Pat embarks on a quest to find out what happened—a quest that will compel her to listen more attentively to that internal voice.
In a detective story, the mystery both propels the plot and gives the sleuth license to venture into places and milieus where she doesn’t typically belong. Who done it, then, is the secret that strips all other secrets of their sanctity. In the better mysteries, the solution also turns the world of the story inside out, revealing how things actually work behind the façade. And, in the best mysteries, the detective herself is cracked open and remade, sometimes even destroyed, by the truth. This points to another shortcoming of series detectives: their fans find their familiar methods and quirks comforting and would be disappointed if each book didn’t serve up more of the same. The stakes with a series detective are by necessity low. But in a stand-alone crime novel like “Small Mercies” all bets are off.
Mary Pat’s search takes her from the haunts of the local gangsters to the exotic terrain of Harvard Square, where she finds herself as disgusted as she expected to be by the hippies, “every one of them a fucking embarrassment to their parents, who spent an ungodly amount of money to send them to the best school in the world”—a school no one in Southie could ever afford—only to have the kid return the favor “by walking around with dirty feet and singing shitty folk music about love, man, love.” She also feels painfully out of place in her red polyester shirt and plaid shirt jacket, “a working-class broad from the other side of the river who came into their world in her laughable Sears-catalog best.”
Lehane has always captured this tetchy, volatile mixture of working-class pride and shame with an expertise born of firsthand experience. Mary Pat thinks of it as “what happens when the suspicion that you aren’t good enough gets desperately rebuilt into the conviction that the rest of the world is wrong about you.” For all the residents’ ferocity in defending Southie, hardly anyone in “Small Mercies” really loves the place; it’s just that what their forebears have made of the neighborhood is their only inheritance. “You knew your neighbors,” a low-level thug thinks sullenly. “You shared your food and your rituals and your music. Nothing changed. It was the one fucking thing they couldn’t take from you. But they could. They would. They were. Forcing their notions and their ways and their lies on you.”
Among Southie’s few unequivocal partisans in “Small Mercies” is Mary Pat’s sister, Big Peg, who assures Mary Pat that nothing too terrible can happen to Jules, provided she remains in the neighborhood. When Mary Pat points out that her son died in the playground right across the street from her apartment, Big Peg blames the death on the boy’s stint in Vietnam. Mary Pat would like to believe it, but that same little voice reminds her that her son didn’t start using until he got back. She looks at Big Peg’s daughter (Little Peg, naturally) and sees a drab, twitchy child whom she remembers as having once “sparked like a snapped electric wire in a storm,” as being a kid filled with hilarity and joy. “What takes that from them? Mary Pat wonders. Is it us?” The scene echoes one from “Gone, Baby, Gone,” in which the protagonists struggle mightily to return an abducted child to her feckless, druggie mother, who then props the kid in front of the TV and forgets her.
Mary Pat’s perception of Southie begins to peel away from the neighborhood’s defensive self-image. When it becomes generally known that Jules is probably dead and that Mary Pat’s inquiries are making trouble for the local mob, no one offers her aid or comfort. “You know, we always say we stand for things here,” she tells a former classmate. “We might not have much, but we have the neighborhood. We got a code. We watch out for one another.” Then she adds, “What a crock of shit.”
If this ferocious crime novel has a flaw, it lies in the unlikely transformation of its middle-aged protagonist from a working mother into a figure one of the local hoods calls “Mary Pat Jack,” honoring a now forgotten 1971 B movie, “Billy Jack,” about a part-Navajo veteran turned justice-seeking vigilante. (Lehane’s historical pop-culture references are impeccable.) The novel mentions, almost as an afterthought, that violence has always been a part of Mary Pat’s life, that she has loved fighting since she was a child. This doesn’t plausibly explain how she’s able to intimidate and outsmart an assortment of armed, hardened criminals. She’s meant to be scoured down by loss into an elemental, almost mythic personification of revenge; with nothing left, she has nothing left to fear. “I’m not a person anymore,” she tells Coyne. “I’m a testament.” This notion meshes uneasily with the novel’s other, more psychological tale of discovery: Mary Pat’s growing and humbling recognition of her own racism and of the hatred festering all around her in Southie.
Sometimes these paths coincide. In a group of co-workers, Mary Pat points out that a woman who rails about how Blacks are “all lazy and from broken homes and how the men all fuck around and don’t stick around to raise their kids” has described her own life history and character. “When’s the last time you did even half the amount of work around here the rest of us do?” Mary Pat asks. But such moments are incidental to Mary Pat’s awakening; self-criticism is its core. Every so often, she pauses in her merciless, almost superhuman, and admittedly highly gratifying campaign of vengeance to experience “a fresh horror of the self.” In the midst of so much devastation, she wonders about her “grubby desperation . . . to feel superior to someone. Anyone.”
Lehane has been wrestling with Boston’s ugly racial legacy since his first novel, “A Drink Before the War,” published in 1994. Patrick Kenzie, the book’s narrator, thinks of himself as more enlightened than his Dorchester neighbors. But, when he and his P.I. partner get caught in the middle of a war between rival Black gangs and one side sends shooters to take them out, he finds himself screaming a racial slur as they flee. Like the bloodstains on Lady Macbeth’s hands, the racism he inherited seems impossible to scrub out.
“I believed from a very young age that all race warfare is essentially class warfare,” Lehane once told an interviewer, “and that it’s in the better interests of the haves to have the have-nots fighting among themselves.” Mary Pat harbors glimmers of Lehane’s cross-racial class consciousness, but hers is not a story with enough of a future to allow her to do anything about it. All the same, she pointedly reflects that, though “she can’t blame the coloreds for wanting to escape their shithole,” surely “trading it for her shithole makes no sense.”
After federal desegregation orders took effect in Boston, in September, 1974, Black students braved jeering crowds of protesters throwing eggs, bottles, and bricks to find nearly empty classrooms. Not a single white student attended South Boston High School that day. Eventually, more than thirty thousand Boston public-school students left for private and parochial schools. As “Small Mercies” winds to its bitter end, Bobby Coyne argues about the orders with his girlfriend, agreeing that the segregation and inequity of Boston’s public-school system is “racist bullshit, and it’s unforgivable. But this is not the solution.” Then what is, she asks, causing him to pull up short. “I have no idea,” he replies. As Mary Pat’s mother might put it, he has just run out of road. ♦