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Dennis Lehane sets the page on fire again and again
Book Review
By Derryll White
Lehane, Dennis (1996). Darkness, Take My Hand.
The issue, he wrote, is pain.
“Love is a nettle that must be harvested every moment if one wishes to sleep in its shade” – Pablo Picasso
Dennis Lehane does tawdry, sleazy back alley images better than anyone writing today. When he takes the reader inside working class Dorchester, an outgrowth of the suave university and business-centred Boston, a different time zone is entered. It is a bleak, gangster-ridden universe that most Americans pretend doesn’t exist.
Lehane’s world, as experienced by his chief characters Patrick Kenzie and Angie Genarro, is one of immense darkness and pain. Everyone hurts and yet there are moments of supreme joy and beauty within that austere noir universe. Reading ‘Darkness, Take My Hand’ is a privilege. Love is not pretty or trite – it hurts, is incredibly meaningful, and real.
Every page of this novel takes the reader outside the known, back to the memory of lives once lived. It is a dialogue with a very old friend, from so long ago the reader has almost forgotten his existence. Such is Lehane’s power. He pulls the reader back to expose what might have been – not in Dorchester but in Oliver, Digby, Cranbrook, wherever memory once resided.
There is perhaps extreme violence here, but there is also the most beautiful writing one could wish to read. Dennis Lehane sets the page on fire, time and time again.
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Excerpts from the novel:
SELF-REGULATION – I know society tells us it’s good to talk about tragedy, to discuss it with friends or qualified strangers, and maybe so. But I often think we talk way too much in this society, that we consider verbalization a panacea that it very often is not, and that we turn a blind eye to the sort of morbid self-absorption that becomes a predictable by-product of it.
I’m prone to brooding as it is, and I spend a lot of time by myself which makes it worse, and maybe some good would have come if I’d discussed Jason’s death with someone. But I didn’t.
A COMMENT – “He wants Kenzie to share his postmodern malaise. That the world is off its hinges and can’t be reattached, that a thousand voices shout inane opinions at one another and not one will change any of the others. That we are constantly at cross purposes and there’s no holistic shared accumulation of knowledge. That children disappear every day and we say, “How tragic. Pass the salt.” He looked at me. “Sound right?”
– 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.
