Re: The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

[Guest guest]

A rousing novel of hard times in 1919 Boston

By Lynn Harnett, Seacoast Sunday, November 30, 2008

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane. Morrow.

Lehane's big Boston novel is about the 1919 police strike like "

ina " is about adultery.

" The Given Day " is a story of tumultuous times. It encompasses the

1918 World Series, the flu pandemic, creeping Prohibition, corruption

and political machinery, racism, poverty and injustice. It teems with

new immigrants competing for jobs and includes a few bomb-throwing

anarchists and Bolsheviks who fan the eager flames of Red-menace

paranoia. The devastating strike is the looming culmination of

inevitability.

But mostly it's about the people. Lehane gives us big, flawed heroes

and heroines and makes us unabashedly root for them. Ambitious

Irish-American beat cop Danny Coughlin, son of a powerful police

captain, yearns to be the youngest detective ever. Meanwhile he steers

clear of union talk, shuns the woman he loves because of her secret

past, and keeps his nose to the grindstone 80 hours a week for

below-poverty wages. (Why cops are paid less than streetcar

conductors, however, is never quite clear.)

Luther ce, a fun-loving, baseball-playing black man and

father-to-be, sobers up in a hurry when he has to flee Tulsa after a

fatal falling-out with a crime boss. Landing in Boston, he gets a job

with the Coughlin family, pines for his wife, and befriends Danny's

ex-lover, Nora, the Coughlin's Irish immigrant maid.

Neither Danny nor Luther is the least political, wanting only to get

on with their lives. Luther, of course, lives in a volatile miasma of

racism, which he copes with mostly by avoidance. In Boston he's taken

in by a family active in the burgeoning NAACP and nurtures his

self-respect by renovating their new headquarters and absorbing some

of their thinking. But exposure nips at his heels, leaving him

vulnerable to blackmail and betrayal.

After working through the unpredictable tragedy of the flu, Danny

embarks on undercover work infiltrating " terrorists, " various labor

and political organizations, in cooperation with a sweaty-palmed young

man from the antiradical department at Justice — Hoover. At first

eager, Danny finds most of the Bolsheviks more tedious than dangerous

and begins sympathizing with the unionizers. Disgruntled he complains

to his boss:

" 'You've got me checking out plumbers unions, carpenters, every

toothless socialist knitting group you can find. For what? Names? I

don't understand.'

'Are we to wait until they do blow us up before we decide to take them

seriously?'

'Who? The plumbers?'' "

In response, his boss gestures at the Boston skyline. " 'We're

protecting this, Dan. This right here. That's what we're doing.' He

took a pull of his cigar. 'Home and hearth. And nothing less than that

indeed.' "

While Lehane traces the parallels between Red-baiting then and

Muslim-baiting now, Anarchists and Jihadists and assaults on civil

liberties in the name of security, he also explores the stark

differences. This was an era before any notion of social

responsibility for injured workers, before discrimination was

considered a bad thing, before capitalism knew any rules.

Life buffets his characters. He pulls on our heartstrings by reminding

us that anyone can be felled by unexpected disaster and inflames our

sense of justice by displaying the corrosive effect of the commonplace

hatred that small minds use to power themselves through life.

Lehane, best known as one of our finest and most literate crime

writers ( " Mystic River, " " Gone, Baby, Gone " ), has produced a

masterpiece of urban historical fiction. His complex plot is perfectly

constructed, illuminating class structure and political strife and

societal upheaval while immersing us in the lives of his characters

and keeping those 700 pages turning. You won't want them to end.

Lynn Harnett, of Kittery, Maine, reviews books for Seacoast Sunday.

http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20081130-ENTERTAIN-811300308