Dennis Lehane's Novel The Given Day

Lehane, Dennis. The Given Day. NY: HarperCollins, 2008

By Walt Giersbach

Tribulation in a Boston Dimly Remembered

The police/mystery novel has always been suspect as literature, even when Umberto Eco and Jasper Fforde transcend genre into a more literary level.  Dennis Lehane skirted this genre tag skillfully in Mystic River; Shutter Island; Darkness, Take My Hand; and Gone, Baby, Gone, creating well-rounded characters who functioned in realistic, inventive story lines.  But, often, his writing remained “mysteries.”  His work in The Given Day, however, exceeds all his former portraits of troubled people trying to function in his troubled Boston area.

Lehane takes the reader back to a relatively unexplored time just after The Great War and influenza epidemic, but before the ‘20s roared in.  In his treatment of the time and place, he was compared in The New York Times to John Dos Passos and The U.S.A. Trilogy.  Boston’s police department was being paid 1908 poverty-level wages, could be ordered to put in 70-hour weeks, and worked in vermin-infested quarters.  Worse, it was a time when strikers found themselves at the mercy of police nightsticks and attacks by goons, African-Americans didn’t walk through white neighborhoods, anarchists were blowing up buildings, and Nativist cultural attitudes poisoned the civic weal.  The Irish — in Boston, at least — ran the civil service at the expense of the Italians and “Bolsheviks” and for the benefit of the Anglo Brahmins.

Lehane’s rich narrative — in 700 pages — leads inexorably to the police strike of 1919, large-scale rioting in the city, families dissolved by “traitorous” behavior, and wanton murders.  Police officer Aidan “Danny” Coughlin; the African-American, Luther Leonard, who left wife and child after murdering a cocaine dealer; and the immigrant Irish maid, Nora, form the triumvirate of characters working to survive in this turbulent environment.  .

Lehane slowly lets the historical period unfold through the eyes of Babe Ruth, shortly to leave the Red Sox, and shoehorns the Great Bambino in and out of the novel.  Babe’s character is wonderful history, which Lehane has researched beautifully, but unfortunately it has little to do with the story’s development.

By creating this universe called “Boston 1918-19,” Lahane time-travels us into an alternative history that is both distant and familiar.  The streets, department stores and place names are all identifiable today.  While this is entertaining — and emotionally involving — it remains questionable whether Lahane is over-dramatizing the venality, mayhem, cultural biases, and civil breakdown of his city and forebears.  Enjoy The Given Day as drama and enlightenment on issues that plague us today, not history, in spite of the author’s bibliographic sources.
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Reading Lehane’s work (of seven novels and a collection) made me reflect that there are books that launch a neophyte writer’s career, those that put air under the author’s wings, and finally the literary triumph that puts the writer at the top of his game.  The Given Day will give any reader pause to examine the cultural baggage we carry as Americans and that which has been smuggled into our luggage by strangers.  The Given Day is a dense literary work firmly nestled in a fascinating time when the country began to turn another corner.


From the Book Review: Dennis Lehane's most recent novel is Moonlight Mile. You can find Given Day and other Dennis Lehane novels at University of Pennsylvania Libraries and at your favorite branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia


http://www.dennislehanebooks.com/

Read other reviews by Walter Giersbach at the Favorite Books and Book Review and find out about his fiction at  Allotropic Lucubrations

Miroslav Penkov's East of the West: A Country in Stories

Penkov, Miroslav. East of the West: A Country in Stories. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

I read this collection of short stories on the recommendation of my daughter Helen, and her boyfriend Max. I am not disappointed but completely gratified. I found myself looking forward more than usual to the intervals during the day I get to devote to reading and am sorry to put the book down. The stories are about Bulgaria, Bulgarians, and Bulgarian expatriots in the United States, separated from their families, their language, and the tenacious remnants of culture that have survived invaders from the Ottoman Empire to the Soviet Empire. These stories portray an extreme and, I guess, blood soaked country, with an impoverished population, resisting imperial pressures at the same time that they look reluctantly to the West for something better. "Makedonija," tells the story of an old man's love for his ailing wife, "East of the West," is a tragic story of families divided by politically motivated boundaries and  a younger generation whose passions are stronger than their fear of death.  "Buying Lenin," is about a young man who, in opposition to his party faithful grandfather, tenaciously learns English with the intention of studying in the United States. Once there, despite his language skills, the young man finds that he is not connecting with fellow students or faculty, and as he isolates himself, he seeks to reconnect with his grandfather.  "The Night Horizon," is a striking story that seems to be in the present and the past at the same time. A father raises his infant daughter as a boy so that she can learn his craft of making bagpipes. At the same time, her mother becomes very ill and connected to tubes and bags of fluids. Set apart from the other children because of the way her father has raised her, her father also keeps her from her mother--no hugs or kisses, no comfort for either of them. Their isolation intensifies as Kemal and her father set out to make 100 bagpipes in hopes of curing her mother. The final story in the collection, "Devshirmeh," is both heartbreaking and hopeful as Mihail, after seven years in the United States, separated from his mother and sister, is without work, money, or his wife. However, he still has his daughter with whom he spends weekends. Mihail, who insists that his daughter speaks Bulgarian reads her Bulgarian stories, and spins his memories into an epic tale about his great grandmother, the most beautiful woman in the world, and the Turkish Sultan who spends his life languashing for her. As he tells his daughter, the story begins in blood and so it must end in blood. As Mihail, his daughter, and their friend John Martin are caught in and survive their own epic storm, he brings his tale to a close.

Penkov's stories are compelling, moving, beautifully written with hardly a word out of place. He tells each story from a new perspective, each time revealing the hearts of his characters to the reader.