The most powerful first novel I have read

Desktop – Leaderboard

Home » The most powerful first novel I have read

Posted: November 10, 2019

Book Review

By Derryll White

Lehane, Dennis (1994). A Drink Before the War.

This is Dennis Lehane’s first published novel and the debut of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. These two are a product of a Boston environment that most readers hear little about – blue collar, rough and very territorial.

Lehane was born and raised in this area, the neighbourhood of Dorchester. Lehane is very good at locating and describing that colour line which is a fact of American life that Canadians seldom get. There are many Bostons, but primarily they are delineated by black and white.

Lehane works hard at putting the reader inside Kenzie and Gennaro’s heads, both partners in a new private investigation agency. They are complex characters with a lot going on. Gennaro’s status as a hard-as-nails combative woman who is also involved in an on-going abusive relationship makes me wonder about life. And Kenzie, with his own abused childhood, is a white knight jousting at the windmills of the rich and powerful.

Lehane always strikes a chord of ‘rightness’ with me. He uses the murder mystery genre to talk about the state of the sick nation he lives in – America. And he does it with conviction. Maybe that is why ‘A Drink Before the War’ won the 1995 Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel.

Lehane talks about hate in its various manifestations. He explores race at length, both the background and the emotions. Family discord is another field of hate, the deep-rooted things that happen behind closed doors and present publicly much later. Of course, poverty is another force in this field, both white and black. Lehane takes the reader articulately into a Boston that most don’t know, that they can’t even imagine.

‘A Drink Before the War’ is the most powerful first novel I have read. Dennis Lehane looks at the rot within American society and the political system and describes it in ways that cannot be ignored. He builds two dynamic characters and leaves them touched and damaged by their actions, but capable of carrying on. He does all this in a very human way. I can hear the author screaming between the lines “There has to be a better way to live with each other.”

This is some of the best prose I have read and Kenzie and Gennaro are super-heroes for the common man – so like us and yet able to do the right thing in the face of all reason saying it is wrong. And to lives with the consequences. I only wish I could say the same of all my actions. But I will say “Read this book.” I am now looking for ‘Darkness, Take My Hand’, Lehane’s second novel.

****

Excerpts from the novel:

POLITICIANS – “How do they know she took them?”

“Look at the picture.”

“Ah,” she said, nodding, “she’s black.”

“Evidence enough to most people.”

“Even the resident senate liberal?”

“The resident senate liberal is just another racist from Southie when he ain’t residing in the House.”

A REALITY – “Hey, Patrick,” he said, “enough of this bullshit. I grew up oor. No one ever gave me nothing. My old man left when I was a kid just like a lot of the niggers in the ‘Bury. No one begged me to learn how to read or get a job or be something. Nobody gave me affirmative action to help me out either, that’s for damn sure. And I didn’t pick up an Uzi, join a gang, and start doing drive-bys. So spare me this shit. They got no excuse.”

RACISM – Reactionary white rage. I hear more of it lately. A lot more of it. I’ve said similar things on occasion myself. You hear it most among the poor and working class. You hear it when brain-dead sociologists call incidents like the wilding attack in Central Park a result of “uncontrollable” impulses, and defend the actions of a group of animals with the argument that they were only reacting to years of white oppression. And if you point out that those nice, well-bred animals – who happen to be black – probably would have controlled those actions just fine if they’d thought that female jogger was protected by one of her own, you’re labeled a racist.

AMERICA – There is a war going on. It’s happening in playgrounds, not health clubs. It’s fought on cement, not lawns. It’s fought with pipes and bottles, and lately, automatic weapons. And as long as it doesn’t push through the heavy oak doors where they fight with prep school educations and filibusters and two-martini lunches, it will never actually exist.

LIVING TOGETHER – L.A. burns and so many other cities smolder, waiting for the hose that will flood gasoline over the coals, and we listen to politicians who fuel our hate and our narrow views and tell us it’s simply a matter of getting back to basics while they sit in their beachfront properties and listen to the surf so they won’t have to hear the screams of the drowning.

– 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.