Stones of Your Father Standing Today

Two weeks ago, this book surprised me during a visit to the bookstore. Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, had written a historical novel set in the Boston of 1918-1919, and it had slipped past me in hardcover. As a fan of the American historical novel, and as someone eager to read Lehane after enjoying the movie versions of the two novels mentioned above, I don't know why I would have missed this in its more expensive form. (After research on the internets, I now know: because the hardcover jacket design was pretty danged awful. Design matters, people!)

The novel essentially follows events in Boston leading up to the police strike in the summer of 1919, after working through some pretty important events through the previous year -- the spread of the 1918 flu epidemic, Babe Ruth's last seasons as a pitcher for the Red Sox (and the piano he sank in a Sudbury pond), and the Great Molasses Flood, one of my favorite bits of weird American history. Lehane, who'd also served as a writer for HBO's The Wire, has an attuned ear for the kind of short-handed and slangy dialogue of the overworked cop, the pool hall narco kingpin, and the power-mad brass. One early scene, set in Tulsa, vividly channels Proposition Joe in the character of the Deacon Broscious:

"In my experience," the Deacon Broscious said, "the most memorable thing in a man's life is rarely pleasant. Pleasure doesn't teach us anything but that pleasure is pleasureable. And what sort of lesson is that? Monkey jacking his own penis know that. Nah, nah," he said. "The nature of knowing, my brothers? Is pain. Ya'll think on this -- we hardly ever know how happy we are as children, for example, until our childhood is taken from us. We usually can't recognize true love until it's passed us by. And then, then we say, My that was the thing. That was the truth, ya'll. But in the moment?" He shrugged his enormous shoulders and patted his forehead with his handkerchief. "What molds us," he said, "is what maims us. A high price, I agree. But" -- he spread his arms and gave them his most glorious smile -- "what we learn from that is priceless."

Luther never saw Dandy and Smoke move, but when he turned at the sound of Jessie's grunt, they'd already clamped his wrists to the table and Smoke had Jessie's head held fast in his hands.

Lehane's past work in the crime genre surely influenced the pacing and cliff-hanging, though this work isn't exactly on the mystery/detective spectrum. In fact, the work it most often brought to mind was Don DeLillo's Underworld, in that The Given Day works as a kind of survey of the culture both in the early twentieth century and the early twenty-first. With a plot that concerns the imagined dangers of American "socialism" and the real but over-hyped threat of anarchic or Bolshevik terrorism, it's hard not to find contemporary problems lying in this century-old setting. Lehane even refers to the WWI-era renaming of frankfurters as "liberty sausages," bringing to mind this decade's Freedom Fries.

Like DeLillo's book (or like Doctorow's Ragtime), you'll find imagined characters interacting with notables of the day. Babe Ruth, Samuel Gompers, Calvin Coolidge, Eugene O'Neil, Warren Beatty John Reed, and DeLillo's good ol' gay Edgar Hoover.

Further, in "Babe Ruth in Ohio," The Given Day contains the second best baseball-related short story masquerading as preface since DeLillo's "Pafko at the Wall." Read these first few pages of Lehane's novel while browsing at your friendly neighborhood independent bookseller, and you'll pretty quickly grasp this books' strength. As powefully as anything I can recall, "Babe Ruth in Ohio" manages to portray the Red Sox and the Cubs in a pick-up game against some African-American factory workers in a way that highlights the twin curses of privilege and race.