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Overview
Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane's long-awaited eighth novel unflinchingly captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the crossroads between past and future. Filled with a cast of unforgettable characters more richly drawn than any Lehane has ever created, The Given Day tells the story of two families—one black, one white—swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power. Beat cop Danny Coughlin, the son of one of the city's most beloved and powerful police captains, joins a burgeoning union movement and the hunt for violent radicals. Luther Laurence, on the run after a deadly confrontation with a crime boss in Tulsa, works for the Coughlin family and tries desperately to find his way home to his pregnant wife.
Here, too, are some of the most influential figures of the era—Babe Ruth; Eugene O'Neill; leftist activist Jack Reed; NAACP founder W. E. B. DuBois; Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson's ruthless Red-chasing attorney general; cunning Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge; and an ambitious young Department of Justice lawyer named John Hoover.
Coursing through some of the pivotal events of the time—including the Spanish Influenza pandemic—and culminating in the Boston Police Strike of 1919, The Given Day explores the crippling violence and irrepressible exuberance of a country at war with, and in the thrall of, itself. As Danny, Luther, and those around them struggle to define themselves in increasingly turbulent times, theygradually find family in one another and, together, ride a rising storm of hardship, deprivation, and hope that will change all their lives.
Editorials
John Freeman
Not only is Lehane working on a larger historical scale, he has turned up the volume on his prose, setting a tone of epic exaggeration…Lehane has created a novel of such momentum we cannot help cheering Danny on in his impossible fight. On this front and others The Given Day, like John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, is a human meat-grinder of a book. Throughout men, women and children are burned, blown up, shot, punched, head-butted, run over by police cruisers, even vaporized by a tidal wave of hot molasses when an industrial tank explodes. "All you'd need would be a general strike," says one character in Dos Passos' great work. "If people only realized how…easy it would be." Here are some people who would tell you otherwise.—The New York Times Book Review
Jonathan Yardley
Lehane has done something brave and ambitious: He has written a historical novel that unquestionably is his grab for the brass ring, an effort to establish his credentials in literary as well as commercial terms. Immense in length and scope, it is set at the end of World War I, a time when "people were angry, people were shouting, people were dying in trenches and marching outside factories," and it culminates in one of the most traumatic events in Boston's history, the policemen's strike of 1919…It's a powerful moment in history, and Lehane makes the most of it.—The Washington Post
Janet Maslin
No more thinking of Mr. Lehane as an author of detective novels that make good movies (Gone, Baby, Gone) and tell devastatingly bleak Boston stories (Mystic River). He has written a majestic, fiery epic that moves him far beyond the confines of the crime genre…The Given Day is a huge, impassioned, intensively researched book that brings history alive by grounding the present in the lessons of the past.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
A seasoned TV and film actor, Michael Boatman is an excellent choice for Lehane's historical fiction. Set in Boston at the time of the 1919 policemen's strike, the novel involves a range of characters including Babe Ruth and sundry African-American, Irish, Irish-American, Italian and Italian-American men and women. Boatman creates a clear and engaging persona for each and handles all the accents convincingly. His pacing helps draw listeners into the lives contorted by the social, economic and political turmoil of the era that Lehane describes so exquisitely. Fans of Mystic River will be swept into this full-bodied production. A Morrow hardcover (Reviews, July 7). (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Library Journal
Shamus Award winner Lehane's first historical novel is a clear winner, displaying all the virtues the author (Mystic River) has shown in his exceptional series of crime novels: narrative verve, sensitivity to setting, the interweaving of complicated story lines, an apt and emotionally satisfying denouement-and, above all, the author's abiding love for his characters and the human condition. In 1917, the Great War in Europe is still being waged, but with America's entry into the conflict, people expect it to end soon. Boston's policemen have a grievance. With their wages scaled to the cost of living in 1905, earnings lie well below the poverty level, and working conditions are appalling. The city government has reneged on its promise to readjust wages after the war. With anarchists planting bombs and social unrest in the air, there is little sympathy in Boston for the policemen's threat to strike. When the strike finally breaks in 1919, the strikers receive an object lesson in the bitter truth that "different sets of rules [apply] for different classes of people." Against this background of turmoil, an unexpected friendship develops between Irish American policeman Danny Coughlin and African American Luther Laurence, on the run from gangsters and police. Lehane's long-awaited eighth novel is as good as it gets. Enthusiastically recommended for all fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ6/15/08.]
—David Keymer
The Barnes & Noble Review
In his novels Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone, -- both turned into gritty, dark, and terrific films -- Dennis Lehane has used a crime-fiction framework to intimately explore the shadowy depths and hidden drama of his hometown. Lehane knows Boston like nobody else, from its Harvard-educated Brahmin elites to its ethnic working stiffs whose roots trace back to Ireland, Italy, and elsewhere. His tales map the city's twisting streets and alleyways, so often incomprehensible to outsiders, and delve beyond the surface provincialism of its anything-but-laid-back populace. Now, with The Given Day, Lehane turns his literary focus to Boston's troubled past.The Given Day is Lehane's most ambitious novel to date, possessing an all-encompassing narrative scope reminiscent of George Eliot or Thomas Hardy while successfully capturing the distinct atmosphere of turbulent Boston in the early 20th century. The book opens as World War I is winding down and the city is about to combust. With the Russian Revolution on the front pages, Bolshevism (and the fear of Bolshevism) is omnipresent. Meanwhile, the Boston Police Department faces the specter of a labor stoppage among its underpaid ranks, a possibility that horrifies the police brass and City Hall. Lehane also tosses in subplots centered on Red Sox slugger Babe Ruth and an African-American fugitive named Luther, who has escaped to Boston after killing a man in Tulsa.
Perhaps inevitably, an Irish-American family is at the center of Lehane's Boston epic. Thomas Coughlin is a legendary Boston cop who's now a member of the BPD brass. His son Danny has followed his dad onto the force, but the two men have dramatically different views about the job. Lehane offers a romantic subplot, too. Danny is in love with the family's mysterious Irish housekeeper, Nora O'Shea, but so is Danny's brother Connor. Needless to say, this romantic angle heightens the drama in a way that might seem distractingly conventional if it weren't so engrossing.
Like his father, Danny seeks to do good, but his views on what that means changes over the course of the novel. At the beginning, Danny views the good in simplistic terms: "It had something to do with loyalty and...a man's honor. It was tied up in duty." Danny embraces the prejudices of his family and his profession against African Americans and other ethnic groups, especially those espousing radical, left-leaning political views. His goal is to move up the ranks of the police department, just as his father has.
The police brass, among them his father, assign Danny to infiltrate and report on radical organizations like the new police union and underground groups advocating violence against the U.S. government. And while the affable, tough-as-nails Danny succeeds in infiltrating these groups, joining them leads him to reexamine his own prejudices and his deeply held beliefs about justice. Danny learns that the dark underworld of violence and its do-whatever-it-takes ethos extends not just to these supposed "terrorist" groups but to the Boston Police Department as well.
Lehane zeroes in on the radical political fervor of this era, taking us into smoke-filled meeting halls where union members argue about tactics and boozy barrooms where fights break out between radicals and "patriotic" Americans seeking to shut them up. Lehane provides plenty of action, too, as Danny finds himself involved in shootouts with bomb-toting anarchists and battles his way out of several scenes of mob violence. If all of this sounds too melodramatic to believe, it's not. The seemingly dissonant subplots come together as a dramatic whole; Lehane builds and releases narrative tension with all his customary craft. The prose is solid and strong throughout, and if Lehane consciously eschews lyrical flights of fancy, his writing style is perfectly suited to the toughness and solidity of these characters.
Perhaps the most gripping strand in this braided narrative is the story of Luther Laurence, which begins with his murder of a crime boss in Tulsa and subsequent flight to Boston. Through Luther's backstory, readers are vouchsafed a vivid picture of Tulsa's criminal underworld. Like Danny, Luther becomes a changed man in Boston: "If a man was lucky," Luther thinks to himself, "he was moving toward something his whole life. He was building a life...working for his wife, for his children, for his dream that their life would be better because he'd been a part of it. That, Luther finally understood, was what he'd failed to remember in Tulsa." Luther decides to return to Tulsa, risking his life to be with his wife and infant son.
Lehane's imagined world is a violent one, and an undercurrent of menace, the threat of bodily harm, seems to fuel every scene. All of these characters, but especially Danny and Luther, are caught in the confusion of wanting a more peaceful world while living in a world where violence is seemingly the only means of resolving differences. Danny is disgusted by the Bolshevik radical underworld that celebrates violence as a way of achieving the worker's paradise, but he also loathes a political status quo that uses brutality and unconstitutional means to eradicate these radicals. Nobody, Lehane suggests, is truly a neutral.
By book's end, everyone is moving away from the carnage of Boston. Danny, rejected by his dad for failing to live up to the family's strict code of honor, has married Nora and headed west. Luther goes back to Tulsa to face his past. Even Babe Ruth, Red Sox slugger extraordinaire, gets traded and faces an uncertain future with the Yankees. Lehane ends the book with Ruth arriving in New York, a dark moment in Boston history if ever there was one, and looking out at the city "in all its bustle and shine, all its light and billboards and limestone towers. What a day. What a city. What a time to be alive." Like the fabled slugger, Lehane has swung for the fences with this sprawling tale, hitting the ball on the sweet spot and watching it arc heavenward. --Chuck Leddy
Chuck Leddy is a member of the National Book Critics Circle who writes frequently about American history. He reviews books regularly for The Boston Globe, as well as Civil War Times and American History magazines. He is a contributing editor for The Writer magazine.