Here is a partial list of groups who might consider suing Dennis Lehane for defamation, based on his latest novel: people who own Hummers; people of Russian descent; people who work for insurance companies; people who live in the suburbs; people who — oh, heck. The line forms at the rear.
Here is speculation about how much Lehane cares about their umbrage: Not one little bit.
Lehane is a truth-teller, and Rule No. 1 for truth-tellers is that they can’t worry about whom they offend, insult, annoy, pester, tick off or rub the wrong way. Like home-plate umpires, they have to say what they see — even if the result is an earful of curses. They have to sell their vision of what just came whizzing past their eyes.
Lehane’s new novel “Moonlight Mile” (William Morrow) is yet more proof that the author is as much social historian as mystery writer, and that his true literary forefathers include John Steinbeck as well as Raymond Chandler. Lehane’s breakout hit was “Mystic River” (2001), turned into a gripping film by director Clint Eastwood, and the author has done the same thing here as he did there. He has precisely defined the gradations of class in American life — and illustrated the distorting downward push of economic pressures — through a fast-paced, heartbreaking story. Nobody pokes his nose into the crummy apartments and seedy bars and trash-packed alleys and emotional messes of lower-class life with more observational rigor than Lehane.
In “Moonlight Mile,” the author returns to his series featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, the investigative duo who starred in his work until he took a break with the powerful stand-alone novels “Mystic River,” “Shutter Island” (2003) and “The Given Day” (2008). Kenzie and Gennaro are married now and raising a young daughter, and so the hectic, perilous life of a couple of reckless Boston gumshoes no longer enchants them. They want out.
But an old case beckons. The little girl at the heart of “Gone Baby Gone” (1998) — the kidnapped tyke whom Patrick returned to her rum-soaked stumblebum of a mother, against everyone’s advice — is all grown up now. And once again, she’s missing.
The plot of “Moonlight Mile” flies at you fast and sinks its hooks into you for keeps. From coke-sniffing Russian mobsters to pill-popping bureaucrats, the villains come in all shapes and colors. Lehane’s writing, as always, is tight, vivid and brilliantly assured. A Boston skyscraper is “as sleek and heartless as an ice pick.” A luckless woman “gave off the air of someone clinging to a wall of soap.”
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But the heart of “Moonlight Mile,” and the aspect of Lehane’s work that lifts it cleanly above other crime fiction the way a grappling hook can raise a body from a quarry pond, is his deep, visceral understanding of poverty’s effect on the human psyche, of how the constant throb of hunger can disfigure anybody’s good nature and grand ambitions.
The world economy is in a shambles. For once, the United States — usually big enough and rich enough to shrug off problems elsewhere — isn’t exempt. Crime fiction seems far ahead of literary fiction in dealing with this crisis, in showing how decent people can get caught up in steel-mesh nets flung in their direction by greedy bankers and downsizing employers. Here is how Lehane’s narrator sees things: “You asked a simple question lately or made an innocuous aside and suddenly you were the recipient of a howl of loss and fury. We no longer understood how we’d gotten here. We couldn’t grasp what had happened to us. We woke up one day and all the street signs had been stolen, all the navigation systems had shorted out. The car had no gas, the living room had no furniture, the imprint in the bed beside us had been smoothed over.”
Just as Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939) told the story of one Depression, Lehane’s “Moonlight Mile” begins to tell the story of another one. The latter is a nifty detective story, yes, but it’s also more than that: It’s an indictment of the times themselves, and a passionate hunt for the real criminals.
‘Moonlight Mile’
By Dennis Lehane
William Morrow, 336 pages, $26.99