Real Change News | Boston, 1918: America’s Asylum

November 12, 2008
Vol: 15 No: 47

Arts & Entertainment

Boston, 1918: America’s Asylum

by: Joe Martin , Guest Writer

"The Given Day" by Dennis Lehane, William Morrow, 2008, Hardcover, 702 pages, $27.95

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There’s no doubt about it: Dennis Lehane, an Irish working-class guy from Boston, can write gripping and deliriously convoluted tales of desperation, violence, and moral ambiguity.  One of the most successful novelists currently at work, Lehane has already seen two of his books turned into splendid films: Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River. Presently Martin Sorcese is rendering another Lehane creation into cinema: Shutter Island.  From the New York Times to the Seattle Times, the 42-year-old’s hard-hitting fiction garners consistently laudable reviews. Lehane maintains his stride with his latest offering, The Given Day, a superb tale set mostly in his well-worn beat of multi-ethnic Boston. 

It’s 1918 and the average cop earns a paltry wage that is ever more depreciated as the post-war cost of living escalates.  Most cops are family men and frustrated by their inability to care properly for their wives and children: “Twenty-nine cents an hour for a seventy-three hour week.  No overtime…The poor night guys were paid a flat two bits an hour and worked eighty-three hours a week.”  Humiliation is compounded by rundown, disease-infested precinct buildings.  Labor unrest in numerous trades and industries is pervasive.  It’s a time of radical politics, of the horrific flu epidemic, and of simmering racial and ethnic tensions.  It’s also the time of Babe Ruth, still with the Boston Red Sox and beginning to demonstrate his legendary power at the plate. 

Danny Coughlin is a tough young Boston cop and son of respected Police Captain Thomas Coughlin.  Danny is one of three sons born to Thomas and his wife.  The family is Irish Catholic to the bone.  A stowaway on a ship that sailed from Ireland, Thomas came to Boston with nothing.  On that journey Thomas met another impoverished young Celt, Eddie McKenna, also looking to make his way in the New World.  When caught aboard, they’re enslaved and set to work in the ship’s miserable galley.  On arrival in Boston they outwit their captors and escape into the throngs of the streets. 

Both become seasoned cops and adapt to the lucrative mores of municipal graft.  Thomas proves the more adept at Boston’s intricate system of Ward politics, coming a long way from Ireland’s destitution. He harbors high hopes for his sons.  Danny could make it up the ranks of the force but he shares the anger and resentment of his fellow cops.  He holds to a truth “he’d accepted since he could first walk: the system fucked the working man.”  Thus Danny eschews a safe career path for the risky and controversial fight for a Police Union.

Another member of the Coughlin ménage is the beautiful Donegal peasant Nora O’Shea. Taken in one Christmas Eve in a state of shivering starvation, she’s now a factory worker and housekeeper for the Coughlins.  Nora has had a surreptitious affair with Danny but the dark secret she has revealed only to him precipitates an estrangement that neither wants nor seems capable of healing.

Luther Laurence has another story.  Smart, talented, and Black, Luther has had too many doors slammed in his face.  Everywhere there lurks something or someone – Black or white — who will topple his hopes.  The best thing to happen to him is Lila Waters.  Luther is out of a job and Lila is pregnant, so they travel to Tulsa to establish a new life.  Oil rich Tulsa proves an uncertain and ultimately dangerous ground for a young Black man drawn to the city’s nightlife.  A violent encounter with a vicious Black gangster results in Luther making a quick and heartsick exit.  Luther makes it to Boston and becomes another worker in the Coughlin home where he and Danny and Nora eventually form a most unusual bound.

The riot that engulfs much of Boston only minutes after the police go on strike is the book’s colossal Gotterdammerung.  Mobocracy is the order of the day as government officials bicker with each other.  Having endured years of disrespect at the hands of whites, Luther muses on the widespread destruction: “The Athens of America my ass.  Way these crazy Yankees had been acting since Luther arrived, he’d change the name to the Asylum of America.”  Death, injuries, and rapes had punctuated the chaos.  Almost a million dollars in damage had been done.  Unfortunately for Danny and his fellow striking cops, they were kicked off the force.  They never got their union.

This is one sprawling and engrossing novel.  At his recent appearance in Seattle, Lehane said that he may write a sequel to this massive book.  I’ll be in line for that one.

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