The Given Day.

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:53:27 GMT

Lehane, Dennis (author).
Oct. 2008. 720p. Morrow, hardcover, $27.95 (9780688163181).
REVIEW. First published August, 2008 (Booklist).

Lehane’s last novel (Shutter Island, 2004) was a historical thriller, but it only reached back to the 1950s. This time he has produced his first full-scale historical epic, a detail-rich exploration of America at the end of World War I, a country on the verge of being torn apart by civil and political unrest. Focusing on the Boston Police Strike of 1919, the novel follows multiple characters through the years before the strike, setting the stage by portraying a country in the grip of panic over all forms of labor strife—from anarchist bomb-throwers to union agitators—and then bringing the disparate cast together for the crippling strike itself. At the center of the story is Danny Coughlin, an Irish beat cop from a family of cops who becomes involved in the police union movement, but the strands of Lehane’s brilliantly constructed and many-tentacled plot extend to all levels of society. Sharing center stage with Danny is Luther Lawrence, a young black man from Oklahoma who lands work in Boston as a servant in the Coughlin house, but swirling around Danny and Luther are other members of their families as well as such historical figures as Babe Ruth, about to be traded from Boston to New York, and Calvin Coolidge, out to prove his mettle by dealing forcefully with both anarchists and strikers. It is a robust plot, but it never becomes ungainly. Lehane masterfully blends his stories of human tragedy and hope with the larger cultural and political conflict in which the action unfolds, and while the comparisons to contemporary life are unavoidable, they arise on their own, without authorial intervention. Like E. L. Doctorow in Ragtime, Lehane captures the sense of a country coming of age, vividly dramatizing how the conflicting emotions and tortured dreams that drive individual human lives also send a nation roiling forward.

— Bill Ott

Booklist Online - Review of the Day

The Given Day.