Dennis Lehane is a master
at balancing literary ambition with popular appeal. Novels like Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone have the structure of
standard thrillers, with a mystery to be solved, a variety of suspects, and a
last-minute reveal. But Lehane invests these familiar beats with surprising
psychological depth. His heroes are flawed men as much in need of saving as the
people they try to protect, and even when the central conflict is resolved, the
resolution can be more unsettling than the original crime. In The Given Day, Lehane expands his
horizons. He's still working out of his beloved Boston, but the time is just after
the end of the first World War, and the central conflict isn't a murder or
kidnapping, but the social injustice at the heart of a nation.
Day splits its focus between
two men. Danny Coughlin is a white Boston police officer and son of one of the
best-loved captains in the city. Luther Laurence is a black man from the
Midwest on the run from his past. Between their stories, Lehane details a
Boston on the edge of social breakdown, from the working class struggling to
get through 70-hour work weeks to the corrupt city leaders obsessed with
bringing down the anarchists in their midst while ignoring the problems that
gave those revolutionaries power in the first place. It all builds to the
Boston Police Strike of 1919, when beleaguered lawmen took to the streets to
demand reasonable wages, and the city nearly ate itself alive.
As a historical novel, Day is partially successful;
Lehane lacks E.L. Doctorow's perspective or the poetry of Michael Chabon's
prose, but he makes the problems of a century ago seem as desperate and vital
as anything on the evening news. Danny and Luther's efforts to define
themselves in a system designed to cut the legs from under anyone who stands
too tall are conventional but moving, and Lehane's attempts at epic are
sometimes rote, like the inclusion of a young John Hoover in an FBI subplot
that winds up exactly nowhere. Other efforts are more successful, and the
events of the strike itself are frustratingly short, but grippingly portrayed. Day never fully justifies its
700-page length or its ambitions, but it isn't a journey anyone would begrudge
taking.