As I write this, Dennis Lehane’s masterful new novel, “Small Mercies,” still has me by the throat. Best known for “Mystic River” (2001) and “Shutter Island” (2003) — made into movies directed by Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese, respectively — Lehane is also the author of a mystery series featuring private eyes Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, as well as “The Given Day” (2008), a historical novel set in Boston at the end of World War I.
“Small Mercies” also takes place in bygone Boston. The year is 1974, President Richard Nixon has just resigned, a federal judge has ordered the busing of students to desegregate the city’s public high schools, and irate White parents are raising hell. Among them is Lehane’s protagonist, Mary Pat Fennessy, widowed by her first husband, divorced by her second and working as a hospital aide in what used to be called an “old folks’ home.” The story begins with a wrenching addition to Mary Pat’s quotient of personal losses: Her only surviving child, 17-year-old Jules (for Julie), fails to come home after a night out with friends, or the following day, or the day after that.
As a lifelong resident of Southie, a lower-middle-class Irish neighborhood where everybody knows everybody else’s business, Mary Pat assumes it won’t take her long to piece together what happened. Yet her inquiries get her almost nowhere, and the police don’t fare much better. Then comes a complication.
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On the night of Jules’s disappearance, a young Black man was found dead on Southie subway tracks, his mangled body suggesting that a train ran over him. His mother and Mary Pat work at the same institution, but they can’t be of much help to each other in a city awash in racial tension, not even after it becomes clear that the two incidents are connected by way of the local Irish mob.
With time, Mary Pat’s suspicion that Jules is dead ripens into a certainty. Having nobody else to worry about and nothing to lose but her life (which means little to her now), Mary Pat resolves to take on the mob.
She has good qualifications: a strong physique, single-mindedness, obduracy. “She’s happiest when she’s opposed,” Lehane writes, “most ecstatic when she’s been wronged.” A lack of squeamishness serves her well, too. Lehane paints a gruesome scene in which the well-armed Mary Pat extracts a number of facts from Jules’s last known boyfriend, first by cutting into his scrotum with a knife, then by forcing him to shoot up some heroin, which brings on a euphoria conducive to truth-telling.
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All this goes on in the context of spontaneous protests and organized demonstrations against busing, including a rally at which Sen. Ted Kennedy gets a rude comeuppance after urging acceptance of the mandate. Watching him get hustled away by “security guys,” Mary Pat “is baffled by the back of Teddy’s suit. It’s almost completely white now, as if he’s been s--- on by a flock of birds. It takes her a second to realize it isn’t bird s---. It’s spit. The crowd is spitting on a Kennedy.” The protesters score points by seizing on a weakness in the authorities’ position: Most of them send their children to private schools, which the busing order does not reach. The repeated use of racial slurs, however, undermines the dissidents’ cause.
Indeed, trash talk seems to be rampant among Mary Pat and her friends, but Lehane, who grew up in the ’70s in Dorchester, a neighborhood near Southie, introduces a nuance. “If you don’t know a woman,” Mary Pat reflects, “you don’t curse around her, even if she herself swears like a drunken trucker. It’s considered discourteous.”
Narrating mostly from Mary Pat’s point of view, Lehane has her skewer other characters while also calibrating her own place in the world. Here, for example, is her take on a White college dropout who deals drugs to pass the time until he inherits his uncles’ cement business. “For a kid from Southie, he speaks like some rich people she’s run into over the years — like his words and God’s come from the same well, while your words come from a place off the map that no one can hear or see.”
If Lehane’s sociological precision gives “Small Mercies” a gravitas seldom found in crime novels, Mary Pat Fennessy, a “mother … built for battle,” enhances the effect. She is a 20th-century version of a Fury out of Greek mythology, and her one-woman war against the mob is a fearsome thing to behold.
Dennis Drabelle is a former contributing editor of Book World.
Small Mercies
By Dennis Lehane
Harper. 299 pp. $30
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