The pursuit of the truth turns a tough Southie woman’s world view inside out.
For the crime novelist Dennis Lehane, southern Boston is a muse, but for his characters it’s more of a curse. Lehane grew up in Dorchester, the setting for his series of books featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, private detectives whose roots in the neighborhood help them solve cases. The best known of those books, “Gone, Baby, Gone” (1998), was adapted for the screen by Ben Affleck in 2007. Kenzie and Gennaro know the local hoods and toughs because they went to school with them. When the pair need muscle, they call on their sociopathic and improbably loyal buddy, Bubba Rogowski, also a former classmate, who sells illegal weapons, lives in a warehouse surrounded by booby traps, and comically terrifies everyone else.
But series fiction, in which our detectives must survive to investigate another day, can’t fully realize Lehane’s tragic vision of Boston’s working-class enclaves. It is his stand-alone novels—especially “Mystic River,” which appeared in 2001 and was made into a movie two years later by Clint Eastwood, and his most recent, “Small Mercies” (Harper)—that land like a fist to the solar plexus. They, too, are full of booby traps, but the metaphorical kind that blow up futures instead of limbs: negligent parents, busted marriages, dead-end jobs, booze, poverty, violence, resentment, and misdirected hate.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der April 24 - May 01, 2023 (Double Issue)-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der April 24 - May 01, 2023 (Double Issue)-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.