SMALL MERCIES
by Dennis Lehane
I really don’t know why I’m so late to the party when it comes to reading Dennis Lehane’s novels. I knew he was a Boston author. Maybe I thought his books contained too much violence. Whatever the reason, I want to make sure our L&L readers don’t make the same mistake I did.
Small Mercies is a novel about the forced busing of students in Boston in the 1970s. The courts ruled that the city’s schools must be integrated. Lahane’s narrators are a white mother living in the housing projects of South Boston, Mary Pat Fennessy, and a white police officer who grew up in Dorchester, Bobby Coyne. Mary Pat’s teenage daughter has disappeared and she is frantic to find her. Bobby Coyne is investigating the recent death of a Black young man in South Boston. Bobby believes Mary Pat’s daughter was involved in that murder. It is in that context that the two narrators meet.
Lehane creates characters that are so multi-dimensional and realistic, that he manages to foster empathy for them, despite their extreme racial hatreds. Mary Pat is solidly a product of her surroundings and her upbringing. Although she associates with and even admires individual Black people she knows, she believes in all the sweeping racial stereotypes that have always permeated her world. And we see how, despite her best intentions, she passes those beliefs on to her daughter.
Perhaps one of the most poignant thematic threads of the book is Mary Pat’s relationship with, and sympathy for, the mother of the Black teenage boy who was killed. By the time she decides to offer that sympathy in person, she is certain that her daughter is also dead. In her grief, she reaches out to the mother, even though she is Black. This small moment of understanding disappears quickly, though, as reality comes charging back via the people who surround them.
I can’t recommend Small Mercies enough. It reminds me, in its grittiness and authenticity, of Dirtbag, Massachusetts by Isaac Fitzgerald (read review here). That they both take place in Massachusetts isn’t their appeal. What grabbed me and held me was their honest, raw depictions of very complex feelings of love and hate. These people, with all their faults and all their prejudices and all their screwed-up beliefs, are just trying to survive. It is that struggle that will stay with me. Please read Small Mercies. (Liz)
