{"id":23408,"date":"2023-08-05T08:40:14","date_gmt":"2023-08-05T12:40:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=23408"},"modified":"2023-08-05T12:56:46","modified_gmt":"2023-08-05T16:56:46","slug":"lehane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2023\/08\/05\/lehane\/","title":{"rendered":"Amidst \u201870s Boston Desegregation Protests, A Mom Investigates Her Daughter’s Disappearance, In Dennis Lehane\u2019s New Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Recommended<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The folks in Southie might not have money, but at least they take care of their own. That\u2019s the code of honor that steadies Mary Pat Fennessy at the beginning of Dennis Lehane\u2019s latest novel, \u201cSmall Mercies\u201d (Harper Collins)<\/a>. Bred to be a tough broad by her upbringing in the Irish-American South Boston projects, she\u2019s now trying to raise her teen daughter Jules there as a single mom after two husbands are gone and losing her son to a fatal heroin overdose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then one night Jules doesn\u2019t come home. The teen\u2019s friends won\u2019t be honest about what happened. And right about the time Mary Pat\u2019s daughter disappeared, a Black teen was murdered on a nearby subway platform\u2014that young man the son of a coworker at the Catholic nursing home where Mary Pat works. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe the two things are connected. And it\u2019s the summer of 1974, so maybe it\u2019s all somehow related to racist white Southie\u2019s fury as a federal judge has ordered white South Boston teens to be bused to high school in Black Roxbury, and Black Roxbury teens to Southie high school, to desegregate the city\u2019s schools. And a Whitey Bulger-like Southie mob is helping organize the violent protests (more or less true to what actually happened here).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\""Small
“Small Mercies” by Dennis Lehane, 2023. (Harper Collins)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Lehane, who is known for his Boston-set crime novels like his 2001 book \u201cMystic River,\u201d uses Boston\u2019s civil rights history and the Bulger mob\u2019s true story as backdrop for what\u2019s mostly a Rambo-like revenge fantasy, a page-turner pulp fiction of teeth getting knocked out and gut-shots and blood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A nice Boston cop is sorta investigating, but the FBI is in bed with the Bulger-like gangsters (more or less what happened here). Mary Pat can\u2019t wait, and she won\u2019t quit. She becomes an avenging angel leading a one-woman vigilante investigation into what really happened to her daughter. Amidst the punching and slashing and shooting and running people over with her middle-aged mom station wagon, she uncovers the sordid truth, she realizes her daughter\u2019s and her own complicity in the community\u2019s virulent racism, and she learns, of course, that the idea that Southie takes care of its own is just one more lie to keep folks in their place and cover up corruption that follows the money all the way to the top.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, occasional newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content \u00a9Greg Cook 2023 or the respective creators.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recommended The folks in Southie might not have money, but at least they take care of their own. That\u2019s the code of honor that steadies Mary Pat Fennessy at the beginning of Dennis Lehane\u2019s latest novel, \u201cSmall Mercies\u201d (Harper Collins). Bred to be a tough broad by her upbringing in the Irish-American South Boston projects, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23405,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[1056,1053,1057,1054],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23408"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23408"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23427,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23408\/revisions\/23427"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}