The novel begins with a terrific set piece about Babe Ruth (then with Boston) riding a train back home with his teammates. “The Given Day” may not be the ecstatic “yes” its scope implies - it’s too long, and peopled by too many cartoonish villains - but it does represent a huge leap forward for Lehane. But does he have the power to hit the long ball? To return to baseball metaphors, nine books into his career, Lehane has picked up the big lumber and is swinging for the fences. Peters, to the investment banker James Jackson Storrow and young J. This is a rich period of Boston history, and Lehane touches on much of it - the influenza outbreak of 1918, terrorist attacks by anarchist groups, striking American workers, racial tensions in a post-Reconstruction America and, of course, mismanagement of the Boston Red Sox.Īll these events are seen through the eyes of a family of Irish-American cops, a fresh-off-the-boat house domestic from Donegal, an African-American on the run, and a half-dozen historical figures, from the politically outgunned city mayor, Andrew J. Our literary atlas is going to have to get a lot bigger after “The Given Day,” Lehane’s massive, enormously readable new novel about the Boston police union strike of 1919. From “Gone, Baby, Gone,” a novel about the hideous toll of drugs, to “Mystic River,” his agonized glimpse at the long fallout of child abuse, Lehane has scorched a bold - though occasionally melodramatic - image of that city onto readers’ imaginary map of America.
Since his first novel, “A Drink Before the War” (1994), which introduced his team of pessimistic young detectives, Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, Dennis Lehane has burnished his mystery and crime novels with a beat cop’s back-alley sense of Boston. From Los Angeles (Walter Mosley, Michael Connelly) to Chicago (Sara Paretsky) to Washington (George Pelecanos), and from Miami (Carl Hiaasen) to New York (Richard Price, the late Ed McBain), almost every major American city has a faithful chronicler, or three. For the past two decades, with a few exceptions, the ruptures and rifts in American cities have been most closely observed in the pages of crime fiction.
Rereading this essay in light of the success of “The Corrections,” Franzen resembles Babe Ruth, calling his home run in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series: here isthe social novel about city life we’re missing.īut Franzen was not alone in pointing over the center-field fence to the city beyond.
“I miss the days when more novelists lived and worked in big cities,” Franzen complained, then elaborated what was missing from American fiction.
A dozen years ago, Harper’s published an essay by Jonathan Franzen entitled “Perchance to Dream” bemoaning the cold shoulder American novelists had given to city life.
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