Spoilers!
Hatred is pernicious precisely because once we hate long enough, we forget why we began hating in the first place. That’s how hatred becomes generational, and how hatred becomes systemic. Hatred of others is also often a projection and extension of the hatred we feel for ourselves. Dennis Lehane uses recent American history in his 2023 book, Small Mercies, to show how poisonous hatred can be for the hater and the hated. Lehane is one of the great American novelists of the last 35 years, and he adroitly demonstrates why with fully-realized, raged-filled, viscerally present Bostonian characters. That’s only the starting point with Lehane — great writing that makes me feel something and unmatched character work, both of which I’ve come to expect from him — because what makes Small Mercies remarkable is the protagonist of his story is the hater, not the hatred. The lens with which we see the struggle for desegregation of buses and schools in South Boston in 1974 is not the beleaguered African American children or their parents, albeit they are in this book, but that of the Southie through and through, Mary Pat Fennessy. She’s been hating and fighting her whole life, not for any real reason she can pinpoint but just because “that’s the way it is.” In Lehane’s hands, she becomes sympathetic through the grief of losing her daughter, Jules, and by coming to the realization that her hate may have played a part in fomenting Jules’ demise.
In Southie, they see themselves as a tight-knit community, where neighbors look out for neighbors, and there is an unspoken honor code of protecting their own, particularly, obviously, from encroachment by bigwig politicians, such as Ted Kennedy, and from high-minded elite judges forcing desegregation on them. Because of that mindset, the Southies seem to approve of the Marty Butler gang because they think Marty Butler and his gang of violent men are the bulwark against the aforementioned encroachment. As it turns out, not only are they more like a sieve — they are the ones peddling drugs, guns, and underage girls, including Jules, throughout Southie — but they attempt to instigate a race war by paying off an extremist African American group to shoot up the school set to be desegregated. To that point, they don’t abide by the Southie code: they are willing to kill someone from Southie, if they get in the way, like Jules, who was impregnated by “Tombstone” Frank, Marty’s heavy and right-hand man, or eventually, Mary Pat. For Mary Pat, reckoning with the reality of Marty’s gang is to reckon with her whole preconceived notion of Southie. Her logic goes, if Marty is Southie, and Marty is evil, then Southie must be evil, and that logic train is not one most are willing to hop aboard.
At its core, Small Mercies is a revenge story. Picture it like if you took Frank Castle, aka the Punisher, transported him to South Boston in 1974, and put him into the body of a feisty Irish American named Mary Pat, who has nothing left to live for once Jules is killed since Butler’s gang killed her son (unbeknownst to her at the time, but by supplying him heroin), and both former husbands are out of the picture. Even the women she calls her “friends” don’t care a lick about Jules’ disappearance (as they’re calling it) because they’re more focused on fighting the “tyranny” of desegregation. Heck, spoiler alert, just like in the 2004 Punisher movie starring Thomas James, Mary Pat’s revenge plot includes blowing up the many cars and house where Jules was buried in the basement of the Butler gang.
Meanwhile, there is a good, not racist cop named Bobby (real name, weirdly, Michael), who is investigating the death of a Black teen, which is looking more and more like murder at the hands of four Southie white teens, including Jules. After the Black teen’s car breaks down in the “wrong part of town,” the four white teens chase him into the subway station and attack him, verbally and physically. Frank shows up on the scene and tells them to “finish the job.” Two of the boys in the gang intended to electrocute the Black teen and prostrate his body as a warning to other Blacks. But Jules gave the teen the “small mercy” of bludgeoning him in the head with a rock instead. Thereafter, Jules is killed by Frank for being too talkative about her pregnancy, and she was buried twice (the messed up the concrete pour the first time). Bobby, though, is up against two forces: Marty and his well-connected gang, and Mary Pat, as the vigilante meting out her own form of justice. She’s fearless. She goes after “Rum,” who was ostensibly Jules’ boyfriend, and beats him up in Marty’s sacrosanct bar. She does worse to him later. After blowing up Marty’s gang’s vehicles and his house, she also gets into a Tarantino-like gun battle with the gang, killing Frank and Brian (another right-hand man of Marty’s) before Marty kills her. Racism warts and all, Mary Pat was a righteously bad-ass character.
Interspersed with her revenge plot, or Bobby’s detective work, Mary begins to confront how nonsensical her hatred is, especially realizing that the mother of the dead Black teen, who she and her co-workers took to calling Dreamy, is just like her: grieving and mad as hell. Mary is shocked to learn that Black people curse, and have such righteous anger, too. It’s not an easy confrontation with her feelings though, as even at Dreamy’s son’s funeral, she’s still harboring racist, negative thoughts about Black people. Because that’s the way it always was with her, she reckons, and that’s how she raised Jules, and if she hadn’t have raised Jules that way, maybe she wouldn’t have ended up with the other three teens killing a Black teen. Bobby’s sidebar character development that intersperses the action is Bobby reckoning with his cynicism that anything will ever get better and how much easier his heroin addiction made the world seem. Fortunately, he’s still sober and falling in love with another former heroin addict, who is smoothing the edges of his cynicism.
The Southies, like Mary Pat, as I said, hate out of projection. Of Black people seeking desegregation (and dignity), Southies think they are lazy and they just want a handout. But in reality, not only are many of the Southies themselves “lazy” and either surviving, thanks to handouts, or wouldn’t say no to one, many of them are just unhappy with their own lives. That this is it, living in Southie. As Mary Pat reflects with Donna, who I believe is Brian’s wife, “It feels good for a moment to remember who they were before they again have to sit with who they are.” Damn. Big Pat, Mary Pat’s sister, ultimately shrugs at her own sister’s death because “it is what it is,” and Mary Pat shouldn’t have made a stink about things, ruining their “good name.” That’s how ingrained her attitude toward everything is, unfortunately. Some are able to eventually see clearly, while others remain lost in the opaqueness.
I also think Lehane writes beautifully and achingly about grief, whether Mary Pat’s, Dreamy’s, or Bobby’s (his grief is having lost hope). He compares it to what the real depiction of hell is: a void, devoid of God’s love, but in Mary Pat’s example, devoid of a child. The pain of that void is a dream-like state, where for all intents and purposes, Mary Pat thinks she died the day she learned Jules was dead. She’s a ghost, and a ghost has nothing to lose but seek revenge on all those who wronged Jules. Or as Bobby realizes, something “both irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable lives at the core of this woman.” She’s wholly broken by her grief and unbreakable in her quest for revenge. The paradox scares the hell out of him, and quite frankly, he’s out of his depth to stop it — or the charitable, if more intriguing, interpretation is that Bobby allows Mary Pat to exercise her revenge because it’s something for him to grasp onto rather than the continuance of stagnant, or denied, lawful justice.
Instantly one of my favorite reads of the year, and ever, I can’t recommend Lehane’s Small Mercies more for those who enjoy historical fiction from a master of the artform.
Milam's Musings 