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Original Essays | June 27, 2009
By Fran Cannon Slayton
"Unfortunately, I've been to my fair share of wakes."
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The Given Day: A Novel
by Dennis Lehane
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Staff Pick
After Mystic River, it's no surprise that Lehane is capable of writing a brilliant historical novel. This unforgettable tale is populated with absorbing characters and incidents that are so astonishing you'll swear they're fiction
Recommended by Chris Bolton, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane's long-awaited eighth novel unflinchingly captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the crossroads between past and future.
Filled with a cast of unforgettable characters more richly drawn than any Lehane has ever created, The Given Day tells the story of two families — one black, one white — swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power. Beat cop Danny Coughlin, the son of one of the city's most beloved and powerful police captains, joins a burgeoning union movement and the hunt for violent radicals. Luther Laurence, on the run after a deadly confrontation with a crime boss in Tulsa, works for the Coughlin family and tries desperately to find his way home to his pregnant wife.
Here, too, are some of the most influential figures of the era — Babe Ruth; Eugene O'Neill; leftist activist Jack Reed; NAACP founder W. E. B. DuBois; Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson's ruthless Red-chasing attorney general; cunning Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge; and an ambitious young Department of Justice lawyer named John Hoover.
Coursing through some of the pivotal events of the time — including the Spanish Influenza pandemic — and culminating in the Boston Police Strike of 1919, The Given Day explores the crippling violence and irrepressible exuberance of a country at war with, and in the thrall of, itself. As Danny, Luther, and those around them struggle to define themselves in increasingly turbulent times, they gradually find family in one another and, together, ride a rising storm of hardship, deprivation, and hope that will change all their lives. Review: "In a splendid flowering of the talent previously demonstrated in his crime fiction ( Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River), Lehane combines 20th-century American history, a gripping story of a family torn by pride and the strictures of the Catholic Church, and the plot of a multifaceted thriller. Set in Boston during and after WWI, this engrossing epic brings alive a pivotal period in our cultural maturation through a pulsing narrative that exposes social turmoil, political chicanery and racial prejudice, and encompasses the Spanish flu pandemic, the Boston police strike of 1919 and red-baiting and anti-union violence.Danny Coughlin, son of police captain Thomas Coughlin, is a devoted young beat cop in Boston's teeming North End. Anxious to prove himself worthy of his legendary father, he agrees to go undercover to infiltrate the Bolsheviks and anarchists who are recruiting the city's poverty-stricken immigrants. He gradually finds himself sympathetic to those living in similar conditions to his fellow policemen, who earn wages well below the poverty line, work in filthy, rat-infested headquarters, are made to pay for their own uniforms and are not compensated for overtime. Danny also rebels by falling in love with the family's spunky Irish immigrant maid, a woman with a past. Danny's counterpart in alienation is Luther Laurence, a spirited black man first encountered in the prologue when Babe Ruth sees him playing softball in Ohio. After Luther kills a man in Tulsa, he flees to Boston, where he becomes intertwined with Danny's family. This story of fathers and sons, love and betrayal, idealism and injustice, prejudice and brotherly feeling is a dark vision of the brutality inherent in human nature and the dire fate of some who try to live by ethical standards. It's also a vision of redemption and a triumph of the human spirit. In short, this nail-biter carries serious moral gravity. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: Dennis Lehane is the preeminent contemporary chronicler of Boston generally and the Boston Irish specifically. In both respects he follows in the tradition of Edwin O'Connor ("The Last Hurrah," "The Edge of Sadness") and George V. Higgins ("The Friends of Eddie Coyle," "Cogan's Trade"), though very much in his own street-wise, implacably honest style. Because many of his previous books have featured ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) the private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, he often is pigeonholed (i.e., condescended to) by the literati as a "genre novelist," but as he left no doubt in his shattering "Mystic River" (2001), he deserves to be included among the most interesting and accomplished American novelists of any genre or category. Now, in "The Given Day," Lehane has done something brave and ambitious: He has written a historical novel that unquestionably is his grab for the brass ring, an effort to establish his credentials in literary as well as commercial terms. Immense in length and scope, it is set at the end of World War I, a time when "people were angry, people were shouting, people were dying in trenches and marching outside factories," and it culminates in one of the most traumatic events in Boston's history, the policemen's strike of 1919. Meticulously researched and rich in period detail, it pulls the reader so rapidly through its complex and interesting story that it's easy to lose sight of its shortcomings. But they are there, and they arise from the uneasy balance Lehane strikes (whether consciously or not) between the conventions of suspense fiction and his larger literary ambitions, as well as from his awkward attempt to connect a famous historical figure of the period to his fictional characters. The novel is so densely populated that Lehane feels it necessary to provide a Cast of Characters at the outset, a list to which I resorted more than a few times, not merely to keep things straight but to distinguish between which characters are fictitious and which are historical. The latter fall into two groups: those connected to baseball, most notably Babe Ruth, and those with roles in government and law enforcement, among them a young agent from the Department of Justice named John Hoover and the governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge. If this suggests to you that Lehane is playing a variation on the theme made hugely popular three decades ago by E.L. Doctorow in "Ragtime," your suspicions are correct, but there is none of Doctorow's jaunty insouciance to be found here: Lehane doesn't romanticize or fantasize upon his historical figures; indeed, with only a few exceptions, he excoriates them. As readers of his previous books are aware, Lehane is at times as much social critic as novelist, especially with regard to matters of race and class. Though the central character of "The Given Day is a Boston Irish cop named Danny Coughlin, an African American named Luther Laurence plays almost as important a role and in fact is given pride of place in the Cast of Characters. As in his fine first novel, "A Drink Before the War" (1994), Lehane writes with unstinting candor about race and does not shrink from employing the language of the streets. People in his fiction talk the way people really do talk, which means they don't always say nice things; readers who prefer that discussions of sensitive issues be sanitized must be warned that none of that is to be found in Lehane's fiction, though his sympathy for his black characters is abundant. The novel opens with a somewhat peculiar prologue in which the central figure is Babe Ruth. The 1918 World Series is underway, but (as is historically accurate) it is played in only two separate home stands in Chicago and Boston according to War Department travel restrictions. The Cubs and Red Sox are on a train together when the engineer is forced to stop for repairs. Ruth wanders over to a field where black men are playing baseball — one of them is Luther Laurence — and eventually gets into the game. Things go well until other white players join in. A patently bad call is made in their favor, and Ruth reluctantly supports it. A bit later the black players walk off the field, disgusted and angry, leaving Ruth to contemplate the dishonesty to which he succumbed in order to placate his fellow whites. This is the first of several set pieces sprinkled throughout the book in which Ruth is central. Ruth was of course still with the Red Sox — he was sold to the Yankees in December 1919 — and the idea seems to be to contrast his self-centered naivete with the harsh realities of the world from which he is cocooned. It doesn't work. Nothing would have been lost by eliminating these sections, which never fully connect with the main narrative. Lehane is obviously entitled to do whatever he wants to within the pages of his book, but this one would have been stronger and more focused had he resisted the temptation to bring the Sultan of Swat into it. The stories of Danny Coughlin and Luther Laurence are plenty strong enough on their own. Danny is police department "royalty, the son of Captain Thomas Coughlin of Precinct 12 in South Boston and the godson of Special Squads Lieutenant Eddie McKenna." His father embodies two of the force's dominant strains, strength and graft. Danny has his father's strength but his inner core is kinder, more open to other people. He lives in the overwhelmingly Italian North End and is known there as "an Irish policeman who holds no prejudice against the Italians" and who "treat(s) everyone as a brother." He is in love with Nora O'Shea, an immigrant from Ireland whom his father brought into the family household as a domestic worker, but their romance is complicated by numerous tensions and misunderstandings. Luther has come to Boston after fleeing Tulsa, where he killed a black gangster with whom he'd been involved in the numbers racket. Though the gangster is dead, his hatchetman, Smoke, survived the shootout and is out for revenge. Eventually, Luther is hired by Thomas Coughlin to work for the family as houseman. He befriends both Nora and Danny, setting up a racial triangle decidedly unusual for its time and place and not, in fact, entirely convincing; the relationship gives off a sense of today's sensibilities imposed on yesterday's realities, though the feelings among the three people are genuine and it is easy enough to respond to them. As his friendship with Luther suggests, Danny is an uncommon Boston Irishman. He is loyal to his clan but not supinely so. When he thinks about his father as faithful to "the good," doubts come to his mind: "The question remained, as it had throughout Danny's life, as to what exactly the good was. It had something to do with loyalty and something to do with the primacy of a man's honor. It was tied up in duty, and it assumed a tacit understanding of all the things about it that need never be spoken aloud. It was, purely of necessity, conciliatory to the Brahmins on the outside while remaining firmly anti-Protestant on the inside. It was anticolored, for it was taken as a given that the Irish, for all their struggles and all those still to come, were Northern European and undeniably white, white as last night's moon, and the idea had never been to seat every race at the table, just to make sure that the last chair would be saved for a Hibernian before the doors to the room were pulled shut. It was above all, as far as Danny understood it, committed to the idea that those who exemplified the good in public were allowed certain exemptions as to how they behaved in private." What Danny sees in "the good" is self-serving hypocrisy, and finally he rebels against it. He takes the side of the regular policemen, who are brutally overworked and criminally underpaid, and becomes a leader in their union. Thinking about the just-ended war and the coming confrontation between striking cops and forces organized against them by the city and state, he reflects: "The poor fighting the poor. As they'd always done. As they were encouraged to. And it would never change. He finally realized that. It would never change." It will not surprise you to learn that Lehane's depiction of the powerful is venomous, especially his portrait of the police commissioner, Edwin Upton Curtis, a historical figure, and the aforementioned Eddie McKenna, a fictitious one. There is an especially powerful scene in which McKenna debases and brutalizes Luther, as withering an account of racial hatred and violence as I've read in years. It all climaxes in those days in September 1919 when the police walk off the job and Boston collapses into anarchy. It's a powerful moment in history, and Lehane makes the most of it. So the advice here is, forget about Babe Ruth and concentrate on the real story of this flawed but heartfelt and moving book. Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com. Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "[S]tunning....[A] majestic, fiery epic that moves [Lehane] far beyond the confines of the crime genre....The Given Day is a huge, impassioned, intensively researched book that brings history alive by grounding the present in the lessons of the past." Janet Maslin, The New York Times Review: "Lehane masterfully blends his stories....Lehane captures the sense of a country coming of age, vividly dramatizing how the conflicting emotions and tortured dreams that drive individual human lives also send a nation roiling forward." Booklist (Starred Review) Review: "[A] clear winner, displaying all the virtues the author has shown in his exceptional series of crime novels....Lehane's long-awaited eighth novel is as good as it gets." Library Journal (Starred Review) Review: "This may be Lehane's finest work. His understanding of history, mixed with his skill as a writer...brings alive a period that sounds like the early 21st century....Lehane captures the essence of being American in a fast-changing society that eerily reflects our own." USA Today Review: "The Given Day serves up the historical novel's signature pleasures: sweeping narrative, period detail, entertaining cameos by real-life figures and the thrill of not knowing what's going to happen even when you know what's going to happen." The Chicago Tribune Review: "Despite its length and gargantuan scope of emotion and sociological ramifications, The Given Day is a smooth read....[It] may not pack the devastating wallop of Marquand's masterwork Point of No Return, but it should draw unintended strength from the latter's title." Sarah Weinman, The Los Angeles Times Review: "[A] rip-roaring [novel], packed with vivid characters and suspenseful action....[A] meticulously researched tale that in the hands of this master storyteller jumps right off the page and hollers." St. Petersburg Times Review: "Steeped in history but wearing its research lightly, The Given Day is a meaty, rich, old-fashioned and satisfying tale. I'd call it Lehane's masterpiece, but he's still young and, it is devoutly to be wished, ready to give us much more." Seattle Times Review: "Rollicking, brawling, gritty, political, and always completely absorbing, The Given Day is a rich and satisfying epic. Readers, get ready to feast. This is a big book you won't want to put down." Stewart O'Nan, author of Last Night at the Lobster, A Prayer for the Dying, and Snow Angels Synopsis: Set at the end of the Great War, The Given Day offers an unflinching, utterly spectacular family epic that captures the political unrest of a nation caught between a well-patterned past and an unpredictable future. About the Author
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780688163181
- Author:
- Lehane, Dennis
- Publisher:
- William Morrow & Company
- Author:
- by Dennis Lehane
- Author:
- by Dennis Lehane
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- Police Dept
- Subject:
- Boston (Mass.)
- Subject:
- Historical fiction
- Copyright:
- 2008
- Publication Date:
- September 23, 2008
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- Y
- Pages:
- 704
- Dimensions:
- 9.25x6.29x1.66 in. 2.12 lbs.
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