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It's A Given

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By KEVIN WALKER

kwalker@tampatrib.com

Published: October 19, 2008

"The Given Day," by Dennis Lehane (William Morrow, $27)

Lehane ("Mystic River," "Gone, Baby, Gone") is in new territory here: the epic. While the action spans only about a year, the novel sprawls over 700 pages of drama, from star-crossed lovers to shootouts and, ultimately, the Boston policemen's strike of 1919 and the riots that followed.

In its pages, Lehane carries forward all the attributes that have won him success. His writing is crisp and direct, his dialogue sings (particularly when a Bostonian is talking, which is pretty much all the time), and the action deserves that cliche description "page turner." His description of the riots after the policemen's strike puts the reader in the center of the action (not always a pleasant experience).

What's different this time around is a huge cast of characters and moral conundrums writ large against the backdrop of a chaotic time in American history.

The novel is split into sections, each one kicked off with a short prologue told from the perspective of Babe Ruth. The first real superstar athlete, Ruth also was one of the first to hold out for more money, mirroring the union movement happening all across the country at the time.

You know you're in good hands from the prologue, in itself a good short story. Ruth, traveling between Boston and Chicago during the 1918 World Series, wanders off while the train is being fixed. He comes across a group of black men playing baseball. Impressed by their abilities, he joins them (they recognize him immediately, of course), but things go wrong when his teammates come across them.

One of the ballplayers is Luther Laurence, who will be a key character throughout the novel.

Luther is in love with Lila, who soon informs him she is pregnant and she wants to move to Tulsa, Okla. Once they get there, Luther quickly falls into a bad crowd because ... well, this is where Lehane shines.

One of his underappreciated talents is he writes male characters who are authentic. And so he writes this about Luther running with people he knows are criminals:

"It was that house on Elwood, he guessed, the way it crowded him until he felt the eaves dig into his shoulders. And it was Lila, much as he loved her ... but before he could even get his head around that love, maybe enjoy it a little bit, here she was carrying a child, she only twenty and Luther just twenty-three. A child. A rest-of-your-life responsibility. A thing that grew up while you grew old. Didn't care if you were tired, didn't care if you were trying to concentrate on something else, didn't care if you wanted to make love. A child just was, thrust right into the center of your life and screaming its head off."

Action Moves To Boston

Luther's heading for trouble, and during one terrifying sequence, he ends up committing a crime that requires him to leave Tulsa. He ends up in Boston, where the bulk of the novel takes place.

Once there, the novel's action revolves primarily around Danny Coughlin, a patrolman with the Boston Police Department, and his family: father Tommy (a police captain); brother Conner (a lawyer); little brother Joey; and frigid mother, Ellen. Connor is about to marry Nora O'Shea, the family housekeeper and Danny's ex-lover, whom he still loves.

Danny, trying to earn his detective shield, goes undercover to infiltrate socialist organizations, but ends up sympathetic to their cause.

Needless to say, complications ensue with the family, particularly his father and his godfather, Lt. Eddie McKenna. Both those men are first-generation Americans, Irish immigrants who quickly learned the system and made good livings.

In one of the book's best moments, Lehane offers a passage that sums up perfectly how city politics work. Tommy is meeting with Patrick Donnegan, a ward boss, and Claude Mesplede, an alderman: "They had held these positions for eighteen years, through mayors, through governors, through police captains and police commissioners, through presidents. Nestled deep in the bosom of the city where no one ever thought to look, they ran it, along with a few other ward bosses and aldermen and congressmen and councilors who'd been smart enough to secure positions on the key committees that controlled the wharfs and the saloons and the building contracts and the zoning variances. If you controlled these, then you controlled crime and controlled the enforcement of law and, thus, you controlled everything that swam in the same sea, which was to say, everything that made a city run - the courts, the precincts, the wards, the gambling, the women, the businesses, the unions, the vote. The last, of course, was the procreative engine, the egg that hatched that chicken that hatched more eggs that hatched more chickens and would do so ad infinitum.

"As childishly simple as this process was, most men, given a hundred years on earth, would never understand it because most men didn't want to."

'Simple As That'

Lehane seems particularly interested in the theme of maturation. As Danny breaks from the conventions of his family, Luther has a realization of his own: "If a man was lucky, he was moving toward something his whole life ... that, Luther finally understood, was what he'd failed to remember in Tulsa and what his father had never known at all. Men were supposed to do for those they loved. Simple as that. Clean and pure as that."

While the novel addresses many issues, Luther's realization might be the thing most readers take from it.

MEET THE AUTHOR

WHAT: Dennis Lehane will read from and sign copies of his new novel, "The Given Day."

WHERE: Inkwood Books, 216 S. Armenia Avenue, Tampa

WHEN: 7 p.m. Tuesday

HOW MUCH: Free; (813) 253-2638

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