Review: WORLD GONE BY by Dennis Lehane

“Before the small war broke them apart,” begins Dennis Lehane’s World Gone By, (Little, Brown) “they all gathered to support the big war.” The story opens in December 1942 in the Versailles Ballroom, Tampa, at a glamorous fundraiser for US troops stationed overseas. Actors, singers and sport stars mingle with financial and political heavyweights, the event organised and choreographed by Joseph ‘Boston Joe’ Coughlin, the Irish-American gangster we first met as a street punk on the make in The Given Day (2008), and who whose bloody and brutal rise to power during Prohibition is detailed in Live By Night (2012).
  By now a largely respectable businessman, albeit one who still has business interests in common with the notorious Meyer Lansky in Cuba, Joe Coughlin is respected and feared by his colleagues and enemies. A man who has always ensured that his associates in ‘the most powerful business syndicate in the Western hemisphere’ earned handsomely from his illicit ventures, and a former gangster who no longer has any power worth killing for, Joe is to all intents and purposes untouchable. So who has put a hit out on Joe Coughlin? And why would anyone want to kill him and disrupt the status quo?
  These questions provide World Gone By, Lehane’s 12th novel, with its narrative spine, as Coughlin tries to discover who his enemies are and second-guess their motives, all the while trying to keep a lid on a race war that is threatening to explode as an ambitious Italian-American faction tries to muscle in on the Tampa turf of ‘the Negro gangster Montooth Dix’. There are thrills and spills aplenty as the story unfolds, but it’s in the flesh Lehane packs onto the bones that the novel truly comes alive. Joe Coughlin is a fascinating creation, a dignified savage who is every bit as vicious when it comes to defending his own interests – including, most notably, the life of his young son Tomas – as he is noble in his aspirations for a better, more rewarding life for those he holds dear.
  He is a complex man, the black sheep scion of “a family tree whose branches had bent over the centuries with the weight of troubadours, publicans, writers, revolutionaries, magistrates, and policemen – liars all.” He is capable of falling in love with another man’s wife (in the process risking abject humiliation for them both) while still fiercely grieving for his dead wife, Tomas’s mother Graciela. He is acutely self-aware of his failings as a man and a father: “No,” he says in the wake of a shoot-out massacre, answering Tomas’s question as to whether he’s ‘a bad guy’, “just not a particularly good one.” Haunted by what appears to be the ghost of a young boy, Joe is unable to decide if he is hallucinating due to stress, experiencing a foreshadowing of his own mortality, or suffering a self-fulfilling prophecy born of years of subsumed guilt over the blood on his hands.
  Ultimately, World Gone By is a novel about the turbulent transition of America’s criminal fraternity from the riotous gangster era, as epitomised by Joe Coughlin and his peers, to the post-WWII years and the more organised crime of the Mafia. Joe Coughlin, the former hot-headed punk who grew up to become a thoughtful strategist, straddles both worlds, although from the beginning Joe, one of the great tragic anti-heroes of contemporary crime fiction, is conscious that his is an untenable position, that fate itself decrees that blood must always be paid back in blood. “Sometimes,” Lehane writes, “when outrage begat outrage with enough frequency, it threatened the fabric of the universe, and the universe pushed back.” ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

Interview: Dennis Lehane, author of WORLD GONE BY

Dennis Lehane’s (right) WORLD GONE BY (Little, Brown) is the concluding volume of the Joe Coughlin trilogy that began with THE GIVEN DAY (2009) and continued with LIVE BY NIGHT (2012). To mark the publication of WORLD GONE BY, I interviewed Dennis for the Irish Examiner in a feature that appeared last weekend. To wit:

Dennis Lehane is rightly regarded as one America’s great contemporary novelists. His debut novel, A Drink Before The War (1994), featuring the private eye duo Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, was the result, he says, of his being “obsessed with writing about the haves and the have-nots. Mainly the have-nots. I’m obsessed with that battle, if you will, that cultural war. And the place which seemed like a welcome home for those types of obsessions about violence and the social questions, the ills of our time, was crime fiction.
  “I wrote A Drink Before The War so fast that part of me said, ‘Wow, you’ve got a comfort level here that you do not have when you’re trying to write much more overtly literary fiction.’ And then,” he laughs, “I went back to writing overtly literary fiction. But I was thinking more and more about crime fiction, and the next thing I wanted to say, and that became Darkness, Take My Hand [1996]. So that’s why I write these stories – it was a way to write about the things that fascinated me the most in our culture, and the crime fiction genre seemed to be tailor-made.”

  For the rest of the interview, clickety-click here …
  Dennis Lehane will be in conversation with Declan Hughes at the Irish Writers’ Centre on May 28th.
  Dennis will also appear at the Listowel Writers’ Festival on May 29th.

News: Dennis Lehane for Listowel Writers’ Festival

Dennis Lehane (right) will appear at the Listowel Writers’ Festival on Friday, May 29th. Dennis publishes WORLD GONE BY (Little, Brown) early next month, the third in the historical crime trilogy that began with THE GIVEN DAY (2009) and continued with LIVE BY NIGHT (2012). Quoth the Festival:

Dennis Lehane grew up in Boston. His novels have been translated into more than 30 languages and have become international bestsellers and include Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, Darkness Take My Hand and Moonlight Mile. His most recent work World Gone By, a psychologically and morally complex novel set in World War II was published March 2015. Three of his novels - Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and Shutter Island - have been adapted into award-winning films.
  Lehane was a staff writer on the acclaimed HBO series The Wire and is a writer-producer on the fourth season of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. His film The Drop features James Gandolfini in his last movie role. It has recently been reported in the press that Dennis has been approached to adapt the Irish crime drama Love/Hate for a US cable television network.
  Dennis Lehane will be interviewed by music and arts journalist Jim Carroll.

  For all the details, including how to book your ticket, clickety-click here …

Play Ball

Many, many moons ago I read Bernard Malamud’s THE NATURAL, and fell head-over-heels for baseball. So profound was the experience that I’ve been unable to read another Malamud to this day, on the basis that, to the best of my knowledge at least, none of his other books are about baseball.
  Of course, it was a young man’s love. By which I mean, I fell in love with the idea of baseball, with its lore and language and what it represented, and particularly its mythic status as America’s national pastime. And so, over the years, I’ve watched plenty of baseball movies, and read some books, in the process putting together a very sketchy understanding of the game its great names, among them Di Maggio, Ruth, Robinson, Mays, Williams, Jackson, Gehrig, and the gloriously despised Ty Cobb. And then there are the team names; the Cubs and the various Sox, the Cardinals, the Tigers and Pirates and Indians and the perfidious Dodgers; and the ball parks themselves, from Fenway to Candlestick.
  It’s impossible to engage with American popular culture and not be infected by baseball by a process of osmosis. One of my favourite novels, for example, William Goldman’s MARATHON MAN, is steeped in the game; the game’s argot is pervasive, seeping into the language of film and novel and play, of casual conversation and political speech. I understood the audacity of stealing a base before I knew what base-stealing was; I could contextualise curveballs and pinch hitters and double plays and the bottom of the ninth long before I understood their technical meaning.
  Fast forward to many moons ago, when I spent a very pleasant week in Atlanta in the company of a very pleasant young woman, who very kindly showed me the town, the highlight of which was a tour of Turner Field. That was in March, unfortunately; still, it was nice to finally step into a ball park.
  But it wasn’t until about a month ago that I actually sat down to watch an entire game of baseball on TV. I have no idea why I did so; these days I don’t even have time to watch a full game of hurling, and I couldn’t even tell you who was playing that night. It took about two innings before I was hooked. Given that most live baseball games run three to four hours, and that most games shown here are on ESPN around midnight, I’ve developed the very bad (i.e., time-consuming) habit of recording a night’s game and watching it the following evening. I’m not rooting for any one team; to be honest, I don’t even care who wins, or the score. I’m just fascinated by what these guys are doing, their technical proficiency in a game of millimetres. And I’m less interested in the Hollywood plays, the booming homer to the second tier, as I am by the more mundane plays; my favourite, as it happens, is the third baseman or short stop picking up an infield drive and rifling it across to the hungry glove on first base. Overall, and contrary to what I would have believed from watching baseball movies, and as thrilling as it is to watch a guy lean back and smack the pill into the middle of next week, I’m far more interested in watching the pitchers than the batters, and the fielding, and particularly that of the infielders.
  When I opened Dennis Lehane’s superb THE GIVEN DAY last week, and discovered that the opening chapter was a beautifully written fictional account of the Babe stepping down off a stalled train to go play ball in a field in the middle of nowhere, it’s safe to say that Lehane was pushing at an open door.
  Which brings me to the point of this post. I have THE NATURAL lined up for a long overdue re-read, but I’m open to suggestions about other books about baseball. I’ve read SHOELESS JOE, and it’s probably a bit too soon to go back to it; but if anyone can suggest a novel about baseball, I’m all ears (suggestions on college baseball particularly welcome). Short stories would work too, given the nature of the game. And if anyone can recommend a good history of baseball, preferably one containing potted histories of the great players and teams, that would be a bonus.
  Finally, I have a Baseball Reader around here somewhere, which I’ve been looking for in vain for the last couple of weeks, one which contains Ty Cobb’s letter to the Hall of Fame detailing his Greatest Team. If anyone can tell me which book that’s in, I’d be very grateful.
  Play ball …

On Dennis Lehane And The Emperor’s New Clothes

I would have loved, at about 9.50am yesterday morning, to be able to travel back in time about 25 years to let my 17-year-old self know what my schedule looked like yesterday. Yes, I know it breaks all the time-travelling rules to meet yourself, and interact and thus change the future, but 17-year-old me was just about to leave school in the recession-hit 1980s, and was facing emigration and the building site as an almost certain career path; he also wanted to be a writer, and failing that, a journalist of some stripe, journalism being a pretty decent second best to actual writing when it comes to earning a living, although at the time I might as well have wanted to be an astronaut for all the likelihood of my becoming either.
  As it happened, my 17-year-old self eventually did emigrate, and worked for a time on a London building site, and not a bit of harm it did me. Fast-forward to yesterday morning, 10am, when I was sitting down with Dennis Lehane to interview him for a newspaper, this at a time when I had roughly 300 pages left to read of Lehane’s magisterial THE GIVEN DAY, about which the worst you can say is that it’s only 702 pages long. If you haven’t read it yet, do yourself a favour and put away your current reading and pick it up. If it’s not the best novel you read all year, you’ll be having a very good reading year indeed.
  The good news, by the way, is that Lehane is currently at work on the second part of what is intended to be a ‘Given Day’ trilogy.
  Dennis Lehane, I’m delighted to report, is as engaging as he is down-to-earth, which shouldn’t really have been a surprise, given that (a) he hails from South Boston, and (b) it’s a rule of thumb in the crime fiction community that, with very few exceptions, there appears to be some kind of weird ratio in which talent equals a good heart. Odd but true.
  That interview done and dusted, I headed out to Stillorgan, there to interview CJ Box, an equally pleasant man who is on tour promoting both his latest offering, the second Cody Hoyt novel BACK OF BEYOND, and the fact that Corvus are in the process of publishing his back catalogue of Joe Pickett novels at a rate of one per month.
  Then it was back into town, first to loll about reading 150 pages of THE GIVEN DAY, and then on to Eason’s of O’Connell Street, where I sat down with Dennis Lehane again, this time to quiz him for public interview. It was one of those evenings that could have gone on for hours: we ran 10 minutes over the allotted time for the interview, and even at that I didn’t get to wedge Lehane’s work on ‘The Wire’ into the conversation.
  Off then to Wagamama on the Quays for a very nice plate of noodles washed down with Asahi beer, in the company of Dennis, Dave O’Callaghan of Eason’s, the wonderful Margaret Daly, and the lovely Ciara Doorley.
  All told, a very good day indeed, and all this in the context, as All Three Regular Readers will know, of my own novel, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, appearing in three weeks time, said tome bearing blurbs on the front and back from John Banville and Ken Bruen, respectively.
  Maybe it’s just as well I can’t time-travel. Had I been able to tell my 17-year-old self all of that, he would have broken down in tears and / or had his head explode.
I guess every writer has his or her own motive for writing. Some want to be the best prose stylist ever read. Others want to tell stories. Some get into it to make their fortune. Some just want to be famous, rich or otherwise. And on it goes.
  When I was 17, my ambition was to write books that other writers liked. It was as simple as that, and as complicated. It’s no less complicated or simple today. That might well be a bad thing - I can’t think of any other ambition I had at 17 that hasn’t been abandoned or changed, mostly as a result of good sense or reality intruding - but you can’t lie to yourself. I still don’t want to get rich from writing, and I have no particular desire to be famous; maybe I should know better, but really, all I want from writing is for other writers to like my books.
  These days, that ambition is a little more pragmatic than ego-tickling; if those readers who became writers like my stuff, then there’s a pretty decent chance that those readers who aren’t writers might too.
  What I wouldn’t have told my 17-year-old self, had I been able to time-travel yesterday, is that even 25 years on, I’d still feel like a fake. That when I sit across a table from Dennis Lehane, say, and shoot the breeze about ‘the work’, and how all that matters is what’s produced, rather than the whys and hows, I’ll feel like a charlatan, a spoofer, a con artist. Matters aren’t helped right now by the fact that I’m finding it very difficult to gain traction on a new story I’ve started, which is almost always the case, but right now it feels like a very serious case of amnesia when it comes to writing two sequential sentences that are even remotely interesting to me, let alone anyone else.
  But even at the best of times, when I’m writing a thousand words and more per day for four or five days in a row, there’s always the nagging doubt in the back of my head, which manifests itself physically as something slimy slithering around in my guts. Maybe it’s as straightforward as an inferiority complex; maybe it’s a little bit more complicated than that, and derives from the audacity of wanting to rate my own books against those of, say, Dennis Lehane. Ultimately, though, I think it’s probably a fear of being found out, of a good writer one day pointing the finger at me and without malice or any agenda, announcing that I’m the worst case of the emperor’s new clothes he’s ever seen.
  Because here’s the conundrum. I want good writers to like my books, which means I need first to be a good writer; but in my heart (and gut) I know my books aren’t good enough for me, never mind anyone else.