Review: In “Small Mercies,” Dennis Lehane takes readers back to racially tense 1970s Boston, where a fearless mother searches for her missing daughter
“Small Mercies” also takes place in bygone Boston. The year is 1974, President Richard Nixon has just resigned, a federal judge has ordered the busing of students to desegregate the city’s public high schools, and irate White parents are raising hell. Among them is Lehane’s protagonist, Mary Pat Fennessy, widowed by her first husband, divorced by her second and working as a hospital aide in what used to be called an “old folks’ home.
As a lifelong resident of Southie, a lower-middle-class Irish neighborhood where everybody knows everybody else’s business, Mary Pat assumes it won’t take her long to piece together what happened. Yet her inquiries get her almost nowhere, and the police don’t fare much better. Then comes a complication.On the night of Jules’s disappearance, a young Black man was found dead on Southie subway tracks, his mangled body suggesting that a train ran over him.
With time, Mary Pat’s suspicion that Jules is dead ripens into a certainty. Having nobody else to worry about and nothing to lose but her life , Mary Pat resolves to take on the mob.She has good qualifications: a strong physique, single-mindedness, obduracy. “She’s happiest when she’s opposed,” Lehane writes, “most ecstatic when she’s been wronged.” A lack of squeamishness serves her well, too.
Indeed, trash talk seems to be rampant among Mary Pat and her friends, but Lehane, who grew up in the ’70s in Dorchester, a neighborhood near Southie, introduces a nuance. “If you don’t know a woman,” Mary Pat reflects, “you don’t curse around her, even if she herself swears like a drunken trucker. It’s considered discourteous.”
Narrating mostly from Mary Pat’s point of view, Lehane has her skewer other characters while also calibrating her own place in the world. Here, for example, is her take on a White college dropout who deals drugs to pass the time until he inherits his uncles’ cement business. “For a kid from Southie, he speaks like some rich people she’s run into over the years — like his words and God’s come from the same well, while your words come from a place off the map that no one can hear or see.
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