Review: 'Small Mercies' offer a little hope

Over his long career Dennis Lehane has authored a dozen books and produced an impressive body of work for films and television. I believe that his latest novel, “Small Mercies,” is his best effort yet. Like most of his other work, “Small Mercies” is set in his native Boston – not in the exclusive enclaves of Back Bay or Beacon Hill, but the gritty housing projects of South Boston, or Southie” as it’s known to its mostly Irish, working-class inhabitants. The book’s action unfolds over a few days in the summer of 1974, as the Irish of Southie are mobilizing against the court-ordered integration of their all-white neighborhood high school. 

Against this backdrop Lehane introduces us to 42-year-old Mary Pat Fennessy, a lifelong Southie resident. Mary Pat’s first husband, a petty criminal, was murdered by a local crime boss. Her second, fed up with the bigoted, isolated world of Southie, left her and Southie for greener pastures. Mary Pat’s son Noel survived a tour of in Vietnam, only to die of a heroin overdose back in the old neighborhood. As the book opens, her only remaining child Julie, or “Jules,” leaves for an evening out with friends. Jules never returns home, and Mary Pat quickly discovers that Jules’ disappearance may be linked to the suspicious death that same night of a young Black man stranded in Southie by car trouble. 

Her frantic search for Jules over the next few days leads Mary Pat to question all the values of Southie’s insular working-class Irish culture, the ones she inherited at birth – its racism, its disdain for outsiders, its acceptance of casual violence both within families and on the streets and, above all, its code of silence. In Southie no one talks to the police or challenges the authority of its criminal overlords – those who violate that code can expect to receive quick, violent retribution. 

Mary Pat has reached her breaking point, however. She drinks too much, works at a dead-end job, has no real friends and no expectation that her life will ever change for the better. Jules has been her last authentic human connection, and in order to discover what has happened to her daughter she’s willing to break Southie’s unbreakable rules, all the while knowing the inevitable consequences of her actions. With no real hope of seeing Jules again she’s beyond caring about her future. Violence has always been a presence in her life, and now she’s required to use violence to discover what she absolutely needs to know. She is up to the task. 

On its surface “Small Mercies” is a conventional thriller, but Lehane’s talent and his peerless ability to draw compelling characters with a few keystrokes is for me the heart and soul of “Small Mercies.” The book contains few sympathetic characters in the conventional sense, and the ugliness and bigotry at the heart of Southie are depicted unsparingly. Yet Lehane is also able to take the reader into the minds of folks who see themselves as victims of forces beyond their control, whose fear of change and loss of identity only make them double down on their worst qualities. That’s a theme that resonates in today’s United States. Finally, in Mary Pat Fennessy, with all her flaws, her hard-won courage and ultimately her righteous rage against the only world she’s ever known, Lehane has created a character that I, for one, will find hard to forget. 

Harrah, an Irish Catholic, lived briefly in Boston in the 1970s.