Review: ‘Small Mercies,’ by Dennis Lehane (original) (raw)
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Fiction
Dennis Lehane’s Latest Depicts Boston’s Desegregation Battles
His novel “Small Mercies” takes place in the tumultuous months after a 1974 order to integrate the city’s schools through busing.
Credit...Claire Merchlinsky
April 24, 2023
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SMALL MERCIES, by Dennis Lehane
In June 1974, Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. declared that in order to end de facto racial segregation in Boston’s public schools, a percentage of students from predominantly Black high schools would be bused to predominantly white ones, and vice versa. The first phase of the program was to begin 12 weeks later in two of the city’s poorest neighborhoods — all-white South Boston and mostly Black Roxbury.
Protests broke out in South Boston. Parents there mobilized against the policy, vowing not to send their children to school in September if it went ahead. Tensions over desegregation have reverberated through Boston ever since.
That tumultuous summer provides the backdrop to Dennis Lehane’s excellent and unflinching new novel, “Small Mercies.” The book has all the hallmarks of Lehane at his best: a propulsive plot, a perfectly drawn cast of working-class Boston Irish characters, razor-sharp wit and a pervasive darkness through which occasional glimmers of hope peek out like snowdrops in early spring.
The protagonist, Mary Pat Fennessy, is a lifelong resident of one of Southie’s public housing projects. At 42, she works two jobs and still can’t make ends meet. Her first husband died young. Her son died of a drug overdose after returning from Vietnam. A second marriage unraveled. Her teenage daughter, Jules, is all she has left.
Then Jules goes missing. The night she disappears, a young Black man is found dead at a subway station in South Boston, an area so homogeneous in 1974 that the mere presence of a Black person there confounds everyone. A three-pronged mystery emerges: Where is Jules? What happened to the man in the station? And could the two events be related?
Mary Pat believes that much of life comes down to luck, and that their lack of it is what leads to a certain resignation in the people of Southie, her people, who traffic in well-worn refrains like “It is what it is” and “Whatta ya gonna do.”
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