A Review by Jim Sullivan

     Dennis Lehane is back with a big book, 700-plus pages, and it's not what you might expect from the author of "Mystic River" and five contemporary crime novels featuring the private investigating duo Patrick Kenzie and Angela Genarro. It, like the others, is based in Boston, Lehane's hometown. And it has its share of violence, deceit and mayhem. Lehane is good at detailing these things, exploring the shadier side of life.

    "The Given Day," however, travels back to another time. It's an historical novel set, mostly, in the dense, dirty, immigrant-packed North End area, as World War I is winding down and soldiers are returning to America at the onset of a recession. The book is bloody, tender, soaked in alcohol, steeped in rebellion, and rich in detail. Clashes and confrontations are common. There are two great, if troubled, romances. There's a family torn apart. A police strike looms. An influenza epidemic is building. It is, Lehane says, the ugliest time in the city's history – at least up until the busing crisis in the 1970s. "The Given Day" has magnitude of size and scope, a clear sense of ambition.

     Is it the author's stab at the Great American Novel?

     "I think you're insane if you try to write the Great American Novel," says Lehane. "I think it's doomed to failure." But, he admits, during the writing process, "I fell into the trap. About a year into this book, I did get that feeling – I could be really onto something good, the critics will love this. And it's a recipe for disaster."

    What shook him out of it, he says, is advice given by his pal, southern author Tom Franklin. The two were on a mini-book tour across Mississippi and Lehane told him he "was really hung up on the book. The book was kicking my ass." Franklin's words of wisdom: 'Did you write the book you want to read? Because that 's law No. 1.'

     It felt liberating. "I wrote the book I wanted to read," says Lehane, "and hopefully if that translates to something more, and people say, 'Boy did I enjoy that ride,' I'm very happy with that." He won't deny his ambition, though. "I wanted to make a book that was like the epics I liked when I was growing up, and have star-crossed lovers and huge urgent events. Ultimately, I'm kind of a hybrid writer, the bastard child of pulp and literary fiction."

     Lehane, of course, made his bones with "Mystic River," a taut thriller that was turned into an Academy Award-nominated film by Clint Eastwood, and the riveting Kenzie-Genarro series. The best known of those, arguably, was "Gone, Baby, Gone," later taken to the big screen and directed by Ben Affleck. Many authors with that kind of history would return to the mother lode, the p.i. series and its protagonists.

    Lehane, who recently turned 43, did not. But he did try.

    "I made one last attempt because of my wife," says Lehane. "Her name is Angie and she was saying, 'Are you ever going to do another Patrick and Angie? I love those books,' and I'm like, 'Well, if you can't do it for your [then] girlfriend, who can you do it for?'

    "So, I tried to write one. And it just isn't there anymore. I think it's because at the end of the day, those are a young man's novels. The sensibility shifted. I'm not saying it's any better or any worse. I can't do Patrick's voice any more and that's what those books were about."

    And, Lehane had other things to write over the past five years - five short stories and a play, collected in "Coronado" in 2006, three episodes of the HBO series "The Wire," but, most importantly, "The Given Day." It was published Sept. 23.

   "The Given Day" is set against the backdrop of class, ethnic and generational conflict, an influenza breakout, the deadly explosion of a huge molasses tank, and the end of Babe Ruth's Red Sox career. (The egocentric, cavalier Ruth is a recurring character.) Lehane's main men are Danny Coughlin and Luther Laurence, whose lives intersect in Boston. Danny is a young, homegrown white cop who becomes a labor organizer; he's also the son of one of the city's top cops, himself a first-generation Irish immigrant. Luther is a young black baseball player who, with his sports days over, moves to Tulsa and turns to drugs and crime. He kills a mob boss and flees the havoc he's caused by hopping a train to Boston, leaving behind an angry, pregnant wife. Danny and Luther form an improbable and dangerous friendship.

    At the crux of "The Given Day," is the pending police strike. Throughout the book, a reader's opinion as to a strike's validity vacillates - just as do the opinions of the book's characters. Racial conflict is constant. Tensions between immigrant groups run high. Anarchists are threatening violent revolt. Corruption runs rampant through the upper echelon of the police department. Do the vastly underpaid and overworked street cops  – the most public of servants  – have the right to strike?

    "At the end of the day, my heart 's going to lie with the working class," says Lehane. "I'm a card-carrying populist." His father was a proud union man for 35 years, a foreman at the Boston Sears, Roebuck and Company. "But I don't want to be a cheerleader for it, and I don't believe in the inherent nobility of the poor and working class. At the same time, I also believe the battle of the ages - which has been fought since we were cavemen - is between the haves and the have-nots, and I'm going to fall down on the side of the have-nots most times. But I guess you have to stay open. If I were just to say, 'The policemen were screwed' - which they were – 'so, the strike was completely justified.' … Once I started looking into the effects of what happened - the rioting, the rapes - I said 'Is it OK for anybody in charge of public safety to walk off the job?' And then it becomes the question of the book. I don't think I answered it, but it's not my job to answer it."

      Are there certain parallels between the world of 1918-19 and today's world?

     Again, Lehane avers. "My answer is: It's not my job. "Read the book, make your own decisions. I'm very averse to telling readers what they're reading. I will say there are parallels that popped up [in the writing] that were so unavoidable, that my only choice was to take my foot off the pedal, because if I pushed it would have been beating you over the head with a bully pulpit. My law is the story has to engage and move forward. It doesn't necessarily have to fly; it doesn't have to go with the smoke of a speeding car, but it has to constantly be moving forward."

     "The Given Day" took a year of research and four years to write. "If you're any good," he says, "and if you treat the process with any sort of reverence, I think you write a book in a consistent state of fear, if not terror. There's always this: 'How the [expletive] am I going to finish this? What did I get myself into? This is going to be the one where everyone figures out I'm full of [expletive].'

     "You talk to any writer - except for the real hacks or the people who are so elitist, snobbish and avant-garde they have the self-awareness of a Toyota - you find this is the constant state for most writers. It's not 24/7. Sometimes you have days, if not months, when you get into this godlike phase – 'I'm hitting on all cylinders, I was born to do this!' Then, one day you go back and look at one of those chapters and say 'What a piece of [expletive]! I wasn't godlike that day; I wasn't even ant-like.' Writing is made for sado-masochists and manic-depressives."

     Lehane – who grew up in Dorchester, a working-class section of Boston - was moving from a Victorian house in West Roxbury, a Boston suburb, to a two-bedroom apartment in Boston's North End when we spoke. (In November, he put his suburban house on the market; the North End Lehane inhabits upon occasion is in considerably better shape than the one he wrote about.) Lehane's stories continue to come out of Boston, but these days he primarily lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he teaches writing at Eckerd College. He says he and his wife, optician Angela Bernardo, "are trying to get to the point where we can be six-and-six, but she's an optician and runs her own practice [in Florida]. It's going to take several years to get there. But I can't give up Boston, so we'll downsize into a cool place. She's Italian, went to school here and loves the North End. And I have been in love with that neighborhood since time immemorial."

     "The Given Day" has hit No. 3 on the New York Times Bestseller List. Asked about his commercial aspirations for "The Given Day" – and we talked before the book went on sale - Lehane says, "I don't allow myself to get into that. I think that one of the luckiest gifts I have –I didn't do anything for it, I was just born with it – is I very rarely allow myself to think about things I can't control. If I can't control it, what can I say about it?"

     With two books having been made into movies, a third – directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and executive produced by Lehane – will come out in 2009. It's based upon Lehane's 2004 novel, "Shutter Island," and set in a Boston Harbor insane asylum circa 1954.

     Given all that, Lehane is asked if he now considers film when he's writing a novel. "I truly never allow that to come into my head," he says. "When I finish a book, I pause. I usually have a day where I think, 'Who would I like to play these roles?' And then, that's it. That's a line etched in metal that I never cross. There is a book and there is a movie, two different animals and I write books. With 'The Given Day,' when I'm asked that question I say: 'If I was thinking of a movie I wouldn't have written a 700-page book.'

    Still, Sony/Columbia has already bought the movie rights with Sam Raimi set to direct. Says Lehane: "Good luck guys, it's worked for me so far."

*********

Jim Sullivan, a former pop music and culture staff writer for the Boston Globe, freelances for a variety of publications, including the Boston Phoenix and the Improper Bostonian. He also runs a Boston-based arts and events website, www.jimsullivanink.com and can be contacted at jim@jimsullivanink.com .

Listen to Dennis Lehane Discuss The Given Day at the 2008 Book Expo America in Los Angeles Podcast (MP3, 7.2 MB)

Dennis Lehane Video Interview

Listen to an exclusive interview about Coronado with Dennis Lehane:
Interview Part 1 (MP3, 12.2 MB)
Interview Part 2 (MP3, 17.0 MB)

Buyer's Guide

A Drink Before The War

A winner of the highly acclaimed Shamus Award, A Drink Before The War is the first title featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. Set against the gritty backdrop of downtown Boston, their first case seems to be relatively easy – finding a missing cleaning woman. But when the client is a highly influential U.S. senator, nothing is as simple as it first seems…

Darkness Take My Hand

Darkness Take My Hand is Dennis Lehane’s second entry featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. This time their client is a prominent psychiatrist running scared from the vengeance of the Irish mob. But mafia threats may be child’s play compared to the real danger – a serial killer, dormant for two decades, who’s decided to hunt again…

Sacred

Sacred is the third title in the Kenzie and Gennaro series and might almost be called a comic cape, the Lehane way. It’s winter in Boston and a dying billionaire wants his missing daughter found. But too much money and too little time makes this case even more labyrinthine than the last.

Gone, Baby, Gone

In Lehane’s fourth Kenzie-Gennaro mystery, Patrick and Angie don’t want to take the case of a missing four-year-old girl. But after pleas from the child’s aunt, they embark on an investigation and ultimately risk losing everything – their relationship, their sanity, and even their lives – to find this little-girl-lost.

Prayers for Rain

When Kenzie and Gennaro return in Lehane’s fifth novel, Patrick has taken on the case of a woman targeted by a depraved stalker who slowly, methodically causes her to self-destruct. Now Kenzie and Gennaro must begin a psychological battle against a master sadist they can’t touch – a killer who knows their weaknesses, their loves – and is determined to tear their world apart.

Mystic River

When Jimmy Marcus’s daughter is found murdered, his childhood friend Sean Devine is assigned to the case. With his personal life unraveling, Sean’s investigation takes him back into a world of violence an pain he thought he’d left behind. It also puts him on a collision course with Jimmy Marcus – another childhood friend, now a man with his own dark past.

Shutter Island

Teddy Daniels and his partner, Chuck Aule, have come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Multiple murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this remote and barren island, despite having been kept in a locked cell under constant surveillance. As a killer hurricane bears relentlessly down on them, a strange case takes on even darker, more sinister shades.