Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

Bostonian Dennis Lehane recently released his sixth novel, Mystic River. The first page hooked me for its literary quality. I quote from page three:

On Saturdays, Jimmy’s father would drop by the Devines’ to have a beer with Sean’s father. He’d bring Jimmy with him, and as one beer turned into six, plus two or three shots of Dewar’s, Jimmy and Sean would play in the backyard, sometimes with Dave Boyle, a kid with girl’s wrists and weak eyes who was always telling jokes he’d learned from his uncles. From the other side of the kitchen window screen, they could hear the hiss of the beer can pull-tabs, bursts of hard, sudden laughter, and the heavy snap of Zippos as Mr. Devine and Mr. Marcus lit their Luckys.

Unfortunately, the care Lehane clearly took in creating these prosaic paragraphs tapers off until it reads like any other novel. From page 359:

He turned his head and looked around at the pallets and weeds. No wonder people came out here to puke. It was completely isolated. Unless you were on the other side of the river with binoculars, you couldn’t see this spot. It was blocked on three sides, and it was so quiet, the sound of the cars overhead having a muffled distance to them, the weeds blocking out everything but the caws of the gulls and the lap of the water.

But the story is pretty good and Lehane’s ear for plot is excellent. The three boys from the first paragraph, Jimmy, Dave, and Sean, are the main characters. Early in the story Dave is abducted and later escapes. What happened to him is only hinted at until late in the novel, when he reveals the treatment he received from his captors and how it shaped who he is as an adult. Sean grows up to be a homicide detective and Jimmy is an ex-con gone clean, who now runs a deli.

The brutal murder of Jimmy’s daughter brings the three men together in Lehane’s sticky and intriguingly tight plot. He leads the reader to suspect Dave f the killing, then subtly shifts suspicion away to other possibilities. Emotions, morality, and trust are the key elements these characters struggle with as their story winds to a well-explained conclusion.

The characters occasionally spend too much time and energy feeling sorry for themselves, and while I understand that’s part of being human, I personally find it making me like them less.

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