Small Mercies

by Dennis Lehane

Normally, I avoid thrillers, even highly regarded ones by Dennis Lehane. But this book Small Mercies was very strongly recommended, not just as an excellent novel but as a powerful window into a time when Boston, and Lehane, were changed forever. Lehane grew up in a neighborhood adjacent to Southie. He knew Southie’s bleakness well but not as a Southie boy himself. Even so, his own solid upbringing did not spare him from the consequences of the busing riots. He’s said that the heinous, hypocritical adult behavior he witnessed ended his childhood. He’s come to realize that it left him with a deep anger that has haunted him throughout his life.

The book is often described as being about busing. But it’s more accurately, it’s about the conditions and manipulations that led to the tragedies of the busing crisis. In the first pages of the novel, we meet Mary Pat Fennessy, a self-described “tough Southie broad” -- strong-willed, headstrong, and physically strong, the kind of woman Lehane knew, awed, and feared. Mary Pat has always lived in the despair of the South Boston projects. She’s never caught a break: despite working two jobs, she can’t pay her bills; her first husband died; her son survived Vietnam only to die as a victim of a drug overdose; and her second husband escaped the precarious life of Southie to a solid job and life “across the river”.

Now, at 42, Mary Pat lives in a dead-end world of beer and cigarettes, and like the rest of Southie, under the protection of Marty Butler, the Irish mob boss. In an early scene, she unhesitatingly agrees to a henchman’s request to distribute anti-busing flyers.

Then her teenage daughter Jules, her only light and hope, disappears. Around her, the hot summer is beginning to boil as racial animus, always a basic fact of life, surges to the ugly foreground with the prospect of forced busing. 

What will or can a mother do who is powerless against the world? The story of Mary Pat’s search for her daughter is the thread that carries us through the gradual unveiling of the true nature of the “protection” the mob provides.

Often, fiction can tell the truth better than even great journalism. In Small Mercies the truth unfolds as we meet each character and experience each event, small and large. This outstanding fiction is especially poignant for those who lived through those years in the Boston area.

— Susan Corcoran