Book Review

By Derryll White

Lehane, Dennis (2023).  Small Mercies

“I know that racism will not end in my lifetime. It’s not a simple formula of being nice people. It’s not as simple as “What’s in our hearts is all that counts.” – Robin DiAngelo

Dennis Lehane takes a giant step in a world that is embracing revisionist history and promoting politically-correct speech and thought.  He invites the reader to revisit one of our darker social periods – forced integration and race riots – and to think about what was lost as well as what was gained.

I was there in the 1960s, around the integration pressures and offended by what I thought was white crackers objecting to the rights of black Americans.  I would have stood with the hippies facing down the cops as the buses crept down the streets to school.  I was so narrow in my righteousness I had no idea what the Irish in the tight Boston neighbourhoods were losing – a way of life.

Dennis Lehane tells a strong story in ‘Small Mercies,” with unforgettable characters.  Mary Pat Fennessy is the conscience everyone wants when they think of their place in the world – fearless and selfless in the face of evils besetting her community.  But the author takes the reader past that, into the darkness that is politics and exploitation.  This is a work of true honesty, peeling back the layers of manipulation to give the reader a look at a history not written.

Dennis Lehane is brilliant.

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Excerpts from the novel:

IRISH TOUGH – Mary Pat – one look at her baby pictures and childhood snapshots, all scrunched face and wide shoulders and small powerful body, ready to audition for the roller derby or some shit – looks like she came off a conveyor belt for tough Irish broads.  Most people would sooner pick a fight with a stray dog with a taste for flesh than fuck with a Southie chick who grew up in the PJs.
But that’s Mary Pat.

LONGTIME FRIENDS – They hold each other’s gaze and time falls away, and the girls they were once could maybe, just maybe, become the angels on the shoulders of the women they are now.

CHANGE – Change, for those who don’t have a say in it, feels like a pretty word for death.  Death to what you want, death to whatever plans you’d been making, death to the life you’ve always known.

THE OTHER SIDE – … but she needn’t forget that she still has her way of life.  She still has her neighborhood and all the people in it.  She still has community.  And what these social engineers and limousine liberals are doing is taking a wrecking ball to that.  To her way of life.  To the only life she’s ever known and the only thing she has left to defend in the world.

GOD – “No matter what we claim in public, in private we all know that the only law and the only god is money.  If you have enough of it, you don’t have to suffer consequences and you don’t have to suffer for your ideals, you just foist them on someone else and feel good about the nobility of your intentions.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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