'Coup de grace', by Dennis Lehane: a story of poor people, mafia and racism in Boston

The seven-year wait since Dennis Lehane's last installment (Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1965) has been worth it. coup de grace At times it seems like a crunchy chocolate bar, at times a shameless display of the superior solvency and narrative talent of its author, far ahead of the majority of fiction writers, give it whatever genre you want, and whatever age of birth. coup de grace It is a pleasant enjoyment, an intelligent food, a literary page-turner that respects those who have spent the money buying the book.

Lehane is damn good, sometimes a little too good, and when that happens his books get into the rapid zone and he takes us to the western and we have a great time, okay, but it takes away from epicness, peripheral vision, and we blame him for it. , despite paying their bills with pleasure. Most of his novels are a greatest hits of everything he does well: dialogue, structure, tension, action scenes, characters, historical plot, Irish galore… But when he corrects himself and measures himself against Cormac McCarthy and Shakespeare, he writes to us Mystic Riverand then we know what we mean when we demand from Lehane what he can give us.

With coup de grace We return to Boston territory, the year 1974. Preamble to the riots that occurred as a result of the decision of Judge Wendell Arthur Garrity Jr., demanding as a measure against racial segregation that there be an exchange of schoolchildren between the different public schools. The narration is told from Southie, an Irish neighborhood, which is agitated by the possibility of its kids going to a black high school and blacks wandering around its own. They are all poor but each one in his own ghetto. On that stage, in which Lehane once again – he already did it in Any other day (2008)—, superbly explains what racism, classism, anger and rage consist of, through the best possible form: fiction.

The story that hooks us stars, at first, Mary Pat Fennessy, a nursing home caretaker, who lives alone with her daughter, in a council flat, and to whom life has been hard, but to that they have not taught him that one can give up. Her teenage daughter goes out to party and doesn't return. She searches and questions until she is aware that she has to face 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 may have killed her daughter—after losing to a son from a post-Vietnam overdose.

Late into the novel, a cop appears – who one hopes will have continuity -, Bobby Coine, Irish, stubborn and an ex-drug addict, who is lost and, in a way, still pure. A third of the novel is so superlative that, although you can't let it rest, you don't want to finish it. You'll be hard-pressed to find another similar one. Not only because of how the mechanisms of the action unfold but because of the subtle network of relationships – the scene with Mary Pat's ex or the tea with an old school friend are anthological – and the social scenario of that 1974 told by the racism of poor against poor while the children of the rich become hippies, university students, being the same ones who escaped from Vietnam. The last quarter of the novel does not derail, despite the fact that Lehane gives the protagonist too much of a broad brush and too many shots, but the last pages regain elegance and restraint. More Lehane, please.

coup de grace

Dennis Lehane
Translation of Aurora Echevarría Pérez
Salamander, 2024
352 pages, 22 euros

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