The crime novelist Dennis Lehane’s latest book, “Small Mercies,” follows a mother searching for her daughter during the summer of 1974, when South Boston made national headlines for rising up against the court-ordered desegregation of its public schools.
” —that land like a fist to the solar plexus. They, too, are full of booby traps, but the metaphorical kind that blow up futures instead of limbs: negligent parents, busted marriages, dead-end jobs, booze, poverty, violence, resentment, and misdirected hate.
The Southie of “Small Mercies” isn’t the gentrifying Southie of today. Lehane’s contemporary characters often fume about the “yuppies” taking over their neighborhoods, the gastropubs and fancy coffee shops supplanting the dive bars and pot-roast-scented taverns. But the novel takes place in the summer of 1974, when Southie made national headlines for rising up against the court-ordered desegregation of its public schools.
In a detective story, the mystery both propels the plot and gives the sleuth license to venture into places and milieus where she doesn’t typically belong. Who done it, then, is the secret that strips all other secrets of their sanctity. In the better mysteries, the solution also turns the world of the story inside out, revealing how things actually work behind the façade. And, in the best mysteries, the detective herself is cracked open and remade, sometimes even destroyed, by the truth.
Among Southie’s few unequivocal partisans in “Small Mercies” is Mary Pat’s sister, Big Peg, who assures Mary Pat that nothing too terrible can happen to Jules, provided she remains in the neighborhood. When Mary Pat points out that her son died in the playground right across the street from her apartment, Big Peg blames the death on the boy’s stint in Vietnam. Mary Pat would like to believe it, but that same little voice reminds her that her son didn’t start using until he got back.
Sometimes these paths coincide. In a group of co-workers, Mary Pat points out that a woman who rails about how Blacks are “all lazy and from broken homes and how the men all fuck around and don’t stick around to raise their kids” has described her own life history and character. “When’s the last time you did eventhe amount of work around here the rest of us do?” Mary Pat asks. But such moments are incidental to Mary Pat’s awakening; self-criticism is its core.
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