Mystic River – Dennis Lehane, 2001 ★★

SPOILER WARNING: People Get Hurt

One big taboo when writing reviews is the spoiler. A reliable rule of thumb is to avoid it whenever possible. In most cases, avoidance is no big deal. But what if a “no spoiler” rule blocks you from discussing 75-80 percent of the work in question? Can you sensibly raise questions about an ending when even discussing the underlying framework of that ending risks telling the reader more than they want to or should know?

What makes this issue more challenging in the case of Mystic River, Dennis Lehane’s 2001 mystery which two years later became a critically-acclaimed movie, is the fact I found the underlying story and its resolution entirely unsatisfying, to the point where it exposed for me key problems I was having with the book all along.

Yeah, there’s this guy who does this thing, you know, and well, it turns out it’s not this thing you think it is but it still…

Well, there you go. I’ve said too much already, and I haven’t made a lick of sense. Thank you, Spoiler Police.

Let me try again, and this time limit myself to just the first 40 pages, which is nearly always a safe rule of thumb for avoiding spoilers.

We begin in 1975. Three pre-teen boys walk through a working-class neighborhood. Two men in a car call the boys over and, claiming they are cops, tell the youngest and most impressionable of them to get in their car. Dave Boyle returns four days later, by which time everyone in town knows he was abducted by sexual predators. His life is never the same. The other two boys, Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus, grow up less damaged but still troubled by their memory of what happened and what they sense was a failure to help their pal.

Okay, that doesn’t seem too much to give away. I suspect there are those who would say otherwise, but as most of the novel is about what happens to Dave, Sean, and Jimmy as adults, laying out Dave’s molestation up front is less of a spoiler than an explanation for the set-up. Just take my word for it.

Dennis Lehane is one of the present generation’s most marketable and lauded crime-fiction writers. Many of his novels involve recurring characters; Mystic River is an atypical stand-alone. Like much of his work, it is set around the Boston area. The town they come from is identified as “East Buckingham,” a fictional locale fast losing its working-class identity to dot-com-yuppie gentrification.

There is much to like about this novel; this begins with the setting. Lehane plunges you right away into a world where life is harsh and attitudes change in an instant. You never feel comfortable and cozy in this world, however relatable he makes it.

Take the very beginning: When Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus were kids, their fathers worked together at the Coleman Candy plant and carried the stench of warm chocolate home with them. It became a permanent character of their clothes, the beds they slept in, the vinyl backs of their car seats. Sean’s kitchen smelled like a Fudgsicle, his bathroom like a Coleman Chew-Chew bar. By the time they were eleven, Sean and Jimmy had developed a hatred of sweets so total that they took their coffee black for the rest of their lives and never ate dessert.

Lehane’s writing style bears comparison to Stephen King’s; both write in a high-octane style grounded in a feeling for everyday detail and a knack for terse understatement:

Four in the morning, and she was more awake than she had been in years. She was Christmas-morning-when-you’re-eight kind of awake. Her blood was caffeine…

He woke up with the dream draining thickly from the back of the brainpan, the lint and the fuzz of it clinging to the undersides of his eyelids and the upper layer of his tongue…

Granted, this kind of prose isn’t for everyone, no more than Eagles songs or leather jackets. But it works within the context Lehane sets up.

Author Dennis Lehane, from a 2009 profile in The (London) Guardian. Image from https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/jan/24/dennis-lehane

What doesn’t work nearly as well are the characters or the plot, kind of critical for any novel but especially a crime story. The characters are unsympathetic in the main and developed in a random-feeling way. The plot settles in quickly enough after we rejoin the three old friends along their separate adult paths, but like the characters it seems a trifle too custom-made for delivering thrills at the expense of believability.

The personalities do work for a time, if exclusively in service of a plot. Dave Boyle, we learn, went on to play baseball in high school without ever shaking his abduction experience. “Even if they find him alive, the kid’s damaged goods,” is one parent’s verdict back in 1975, and the rest of the novel pretty much cements this point, almost exclusively. Dave winds up less a rooting interest for this, as well as other reasons.

Sean Devine becomes a state trooper. One aspect of the novel which is established early (and which took me by surprise given how the three main characters appear standing together on the paperback cover) is that Sean is never close to the other two, that he was a friend of convenience in the process of being dumped when fate stepped in and jostled the chessboard. Anyway, Sean is the closest we get to a rooting interest in the book, though a rather distant one with not much in the way of a backstory except for a wife who left him and some friction with his superiors in the Massachusetts State Police.

Jimmy Marcus is the most developed character, and the most problematic from several angles. Since many of them tie into those dreaded spoilers, let’s just say Lehane never seems all that certain what he or you should think about Marcus, a kind of ambiguity which could work in another novel but just left me frustrated here. I think a big problem is the character is very strongly developed in one direction, then reworked in media res to fit the plot.

And what a plot! It’s the biggest weakness in Mystic River, contrived to such a degree it requires one to accept an instance of epic coincidence as just another part of life in the big bad city, and go along with people snapping their personalities off and on like light switches.

More than that, I can’t or won’t say. You know, Spoiler Police and all that. But here’s something I can say: A good suspense novel that throws up twists and turns is something you can usually write about without the spoilers. Here, twists and turns are all this novel really has to offer.

That does circle back to what I liked about Mystic River; it’s a novel that keeps you reading. This is another similarity I noticed with King; especially as King also sometimes uses this propulsive talent of his in service of a dodgy plot. With Lehane, I found my interest in the book was never as complete as it could have been, given my lingering questions about how perversely people acted and how queerly things kept falling into place.

Would I read another Lehane? I don’t know. I liked my experience reading Mystic River, a good deal more than the feeling I had after reading it. His narrative skills are the kind that I wouldn’t mind seeing employed again. He’s had some other mainstream successes, including a second stand-alone novel made into a hit movie, Shutter Island. Clearly the man has talent, and Mystic River captures him when his career was just building.

Let’s just say I’m more eager to read Shutter Island than I am to see Clint Eastwood’s cinematic adaptation of Mystic River, as successful as that was at the 2004 Oscars. Whatever Mystic River’s successes in readability and tone, there’s a hollowness at the heart of this story that only grows with reflection, making me feel more than a bit cheated.

Sorry I can’t say more. You’re going to have to take my word for it.