Small Mercies and Big Trouble in Lehane's Latest

 

Small Mercies (2023)

By Dennis Lehane

Harper, 320 pages

★★★★

 

 

 

I stayed from Dennis Lehane for a time because I was tired of Boston mob novels. I went back after dusting off The Given Day (2008), which is about the 1919 Boston Police Strike. I’m still maxed out on mob tales, but Lehane’s latest has intriguing twists. Small Mercies is set in mobbed-up South Boston, but amidst the Boston busing crisis. Plus, some of the sleazeballs obtain an unlikely enemy in the person of Mary Pat Fennessy.

 

Small Mercies occurs in 1974, the beginning of a 14-year battle to desegregate Boston’s public schools. Massachusetts enjoys a reputation as a deeply liberal state, but that wasn’t always been the case, and Boston still hasn’t lived down the racism that once bloomed like a corpse plant, especially in “Southie.” It was controlled (in order) by big-time thugs, smaller thugs, the Catholic Church, Irish Americans, compromised cops, a local populace that knew what not to notice, and on-the-level police. It was a tossup if the biggest domestic problem was teenage pregnancy, alcohol abuse, or the “brown scourge” (heroin). But at least it was lily-white and black folk–not called that!–knew to stay away.

 

Mary Pat goes to mass, but she’s divorced, her Vietnam vet son died from heroin, she smokes like a coal mine fire, and daughter Jules is often AWOL and probably doing some hooking. Mary Pat certainly disapproves of her  boyfriends, but what can she do? She takes some solace in her job at the old folks home and likes “Dreamy” Williamson, a black coworker. Do they really connect, though? Mary Pat doesn’t know that her real name is Calliope or that she and her husband live a far more respectable life than her Southie neighbors. In fact, when Augie Williamson is killed in Southie, it initially doesn’t dawn on Mary Pat that he was Dreamy’s son.

 

Jules’ disappearance sends Mary Pat on a frantic search. After beating the crap out of a guy she assumed was Jules’ boyfriend, she turns to the head of the Southie mob, Marty Butler–think Whitey Bulger–for help. Because Mary Pat is making too much trouble and noise, Marty promises he’ll investigate. Yeah, sure he will! He just doesn’t want light shone on him or his ‘hood. It’s bad enough a couple of cops he doesn’t own are sniffing around. They get nothing from Mary Pat. That’s not how things are done in Southie.

 

When Mary Pat learns that Jules was with the son of one of Butler’s lieutenants, Mary Pat is pretty sure that Jules is dead. She’s positive of it when Marty gives her a sack of cash and tells her to go to Florida while he takes care of things. Mary Pat isn’t a 100-watt bulb, but she can read a runaround. She’s so desperate she even pays a visit to her ex, who lives in Cambridge. That might as well be another galaxy for someone like Mary Pat. His new domestic life is equally shocking to her, but not as much as the revelation that Jules might be involved in Augie’s death.

How on earth can Mary Pat find the truth or take on the mob? Her determination put me in mind of the two mothers who crusaded against violence in Northern Ireland. Before long Mary Pat has half of Southie wanting to get rid of her, but she’s surprisingly resourceful. Don’t get too excited; Lehane is all about grit, not the warm fuzzies. One passage sums up the cancerous effects of hate in Vietnam-era Boston: “Call them gooks, call them niggers, call then kikes, micks, wops, or frogs…. You can get kids to cross oceans to kill other kids, or you can get them to stay right here and do the same thing.”

 

Lehane is an engaging storyteller who seldom pulls punches, which is why he doesn’t shy from rubbing reader faces in hate speech. You will probably be shocked to discover the book’s namesake “small mercy.” Can a tigers change their stripes? It’s tough to do so in a place where even racists divide ideologically–the loudmouthed Louisa Day Hicks makes a few appearances–and “the only law and the only god is money.” So what if Southie is also a dumping ground for all social ills? Vendettas and mobsters have their own logic. Both play their hands in Small Mercies.

 

Rob Weir