Dennis Lehane's 'Coup de Grâce': A Story of the Poor, the Mafia and Racism in Boston

American writer Dennis Lehane.Gaby Gerster

The seven-year wait since the last installment of Dennis Lehane (Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1965) has been worth it. Coup de grâce at times looks like a crunchy bar of chocolate, at times a blatant display of the superior solvency and narrative talent of its author, far ahead of most fiction writers, whatever genre you want, and whatever age of birth it is. Coup de grâce is a pleasurable enjoyment, an intelligent food, a literary page-turner that respects those who have spent the money with the purchase of the book.

Lehane is damn good, sometimes a little too good and when that happens his books get into the fast-track zone and he takes us to the western and we have a great time, okay, but we take away epic, peripheral vision, and we throw it in his face, despite gladly paying his bills. Most of his novels are greatest hits for everything he does well: dialogues, structure, tension, action scenes, characters, historical framework, Irish at the outset... But when he corrects himself and measures himself against Cormac McCarthy and Shakespeare, he writes us Mystic River, and then we know what to mean when we demand from Lehane what he can give us.

With Coup de grâce we return to Boston territory, in 1974. Preamble to the riots that occurred as a result of the decision of Judge Wendell Arthur Garrity Jr., when he required as a measure against racial segregation that there be an exchange of schoolchildren between the different public schools. The narration is made from Southie, an Irish neighborhood, which is scrambled by the possibility that its children will go to a black school and wander through theirs. They are all poor, but each in his own ghetto. On this stage, in which Lehane once again – he did so in Any Other Day (2008) – arrogantly explains what racism, classism, anger and rage consist of, through the best possible form: fiction.

The story that hooks us is starred, at first, by Mary Pat Fennessy, a caretaker in a nursing home, who lives alone with her daughter, in a social housing flat, and for whom life has been hard, but who has not been taught that one can give up. Her teenage daughter goes out partying and doesn't come back. She searches and asks until she realizes that she has to confront the neighborhood mafia. The disappearance of a son, his possible murder, the enigma, are Lehane territories, and his intelligent nose endows the character with a vengeful violence that we only allow in a woman and mother who has also had her daughter killed – after losing a son to a post-Vietnam overdose.

At the beginning of the novel, a cop appears, Bobby Coine, Irish, stubborn and ex-drug addict, who is lost and, in a way, still pure. A third of the novel is so superlative that, even though you can't let it rest, you don't want to finish it. You'll have a hard time finding a similar one. Not only because of how the mechanisms of the action take place, but also because of the subtle network of relationships – the scene with Mary Pat's ex or the tea with an old schoolmate are anthological – and the social scenario of that 1974 told by the racism of the poor against the poor while the children of the rich become hippies. They were the same ones who escaped from Vietnam. The last quarter of the novel doesn't go off the rails, despite Lehane putting too much broad brush on the protagonist and too many shots, but the last pages regain elegance and restraint. More Lehane, please.

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