The Given Day: A Novel

by Dennis Lehane

book data

1,138 ratings, 3.98 average rating, 469 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		31%
4		43%
3		19%
2		4%
1		1%

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published

October 1st 2008 (first published 2006) by William Morrow

binding

Hardcover, 704 pages

isbn

0688163181 (isbn13: 9780688163181)

description

Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, New York Times best-selling author Dennis Lehane's long-awaited eighth novel unflinchingly captures t

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08/17/08

Dave rated it:

Read in August, 2008

Lehane hasn't written a book in five years. The Given Day is his return to fiction.

It is a big book, both in length (700 pages) and scope. Set in late 1918-1919, the book follows two men, one Irish Boston cop Danny Coughlin and a black man from Tulsa Luther Laurence. The book explores race, baseball, the Boston Police Strike, terrorism, love, and a whole mess of other topics.

It is a huge book, and it is beautifully written. I could not put it down.

The major co...more

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05/21/08

Erik rated it:

Read in June, 2008

Best damn book I've read in years. A bravura performance by a master storyteller. So many things to recommend about this book that I hardly know where to begin. I'm not going to give you a highly literate review with lots of detail. Just read it.

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02/09/09

Kathleen Gilroy rated it:

I awaited fervently for my turn at the library for this book and was pretty gravely disappointed. It begins with great promise -- the period in time in Boston's history where the end of WWI, the outbreak of the great influenza epidemic, violent terrorism, and the formation of labor unions all intersect to create huge social upheaval. But I just can't finish, despite how piqued my interest is about this period of history. The writing was often wooden; the characterizations are stock and flat; ...more

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10/06/08

Laurie rated it:

Read in October, 2008

This book had so much going for it, I couldn't put it down...at least for the first 400 pages. But then I started to feel the characters were being manipulated from the outside, not operating from internal truths, and there were quite a few anachronistic conversations and unbelievavle relationships between African Americans and whites (given the time period, 1919).

I'd recommend it for the history and the exciting read, but in the end I think it couldn've been stronger. I think, secre...more

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09/13/08

Margaret rated it:

Read in December, 2008

After five years’ silence, The Bard of South Boston swings for the fences with this sprawling, brawling entry in the Epic American Novel sweepstakes, and for me he hits a home run. Although it shares the same home turf as his earlier work (Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone), this novel is a period piece, set just after World War I in an America I hadn’t realized was so similar to the one we’ve been living in for the last few years: grappling with the effects of a devastating war, the exact re...more After five years’ silence, The Bard of South Boston swings for the fences with this sprawling, brawling entry in the Epic American Novel sweepstakes, and for me he hits a home run. Although it shares the same home turf as his earlier work (Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone), this novel is a period piece, set just after World War I in an America I hadn’t realized was so similar to the one we’ve been living in for the last few years: grappling with the effects of a devastating war, the exact reasons for which had been forgotten, if indeed they’d ever really been known; terrified by the threat of foreign anarchists bombing public buildings and killing civilians, with the presumed aim of destroying democracy and the American Way Of Life; and mercilessly manipulated by corrupt and greedy politicians exploiting the country’s fear and xenophobia to preserve their own wealth and power. Sound familiar?

In Boston, half the city is struggling uneasily to evolve with the changing times, the other half fighting equally hard to maintain the status quo, and Lehane wraps his arms round it all, juggling three story lines that at first go forward separately, only occasionally kissing past each other like billiard balls, and then eventually sweep together in the rising tide of events. We follow the various journeys of Danny Coughlin, latest in a long line of Boston Irish cops, trying to reconcile family pride and public service with his personal ideals and deep sense of individual morality; African-American Luther Laurence, a gifted baseball player who’ll never be allowed to play the game because of his race, a good man who spends most of the novel trying to fight his way back from one devastating misjudgement; and, appearing at intervals in chapters that stand apart from the rest of the book and yet reflect on its main narrative action, Babe Ruth, an oversized innocent caring only for baseball and made immune somehow by his purity of purpose to the currents of change raging all around him.

The way that Lehane combines fictional characters with non-fictional ones (J Edgar Hoover, Jack Reed, W.E.B. DuBois) and imagined narrative with historical event (the flu epidemic of 1918, the Boston Policemen’s Strike, the Molasses Disaster) is reminiscent of Ragtime. But where Doctorow approaches his story in elegiac mood, as a kind of poet-academic, Lehane’s two-fisted, blood-in-the-eye prose pulses with passion and testosterone – although he can be poetic as well after his own fashion, especially when writing about baseball, as he does in the book’s almost painfully beautiful prologue about an unexpected pick-up game played in a field on a summer afternoon in Ohio. (A soundly hit ball “climbs the sky like it had hands and knees.”) Simply the best novel I’ve read in a long long time, with vivid, vital characters, a rich and immediate sense of place, and a raw, you-are-there energy that makes it a compulsive, compelling and absolutely satisfying read.

(less)

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06/18/08

Mike rated it:

Read in July, 2008

recommends it for: most everyone....

7/26/08: I'm half-done, and half in love. Oh, it's a realistic love, of warts as well as wonders, but I admit: I'm a sucker for a book so fully invested in exploring the deep rifts and crimes of class and race in America.

Lehane's novel opens with a baseball game, inviting comparisons to DeLillo, and his prior work in detective fiction clued us earlier to his fondness for Hammett and Chandler. But his real roots in this book run through the social realism of the early-twentieth-ce...more 7/26/08: I'm half-done, and half in love. Oh, it's a realistic love, of warts as well as wonders, but I admit: I'm a sucker for a book so fully invested in exploring the deep rifts and crimes of class and race in America.

Lehane's novel opens with a baseball game, inviting comparisons to DeLillo, and his prior work in detective fiction clued us earlier to his fondness for Hammett and Chandler. But his real roots in this book run through the social realism of the early-twentieth-century. No postmodern games, no ironic detachment--no, Lehane, like Pietro di Donato and Michael Gold, wears his heart on his sleeve, has fire in his eye, is willing to embrace a cliche or a clumsy bit of exposition to see the story through. If the plotting gets a bit hamfisted, the footwork occasionally a little leaden, the characterization a bit too big-screen, reach back and embrace the pleasures of that genre -- these are tools more than symptoms, and the novel's punches still connect furiously and frequently: it moves and is moving in equal doses.

And now and again, besides his gift for ripping action sequences and sweeping social context, Lehane unleashes some fantastic, over-the-top lines that sweep me up again and again:

--a boxer watches an opponent on his last legs, "notic[ing] how childlike his expression had become, as if he'd just hatched."

--a baseball "soared straight at" a player "and then went lazy in the blue sky, like a duck deciding to swim the backstroke..."

Ah me. Really damn good stuff, so far, and I can't imagine it tanking.

FINISHED REVIEW:
It didn't tank. I think I hit above on most of the elements which worked throughout for me, so I'll just add a couple more thoughts:

--as with the social realist works referenced, there are moments that seem ham-handedly plotted, the kind of ex machina coincidences that make me cringe (literally a page or two after a character is mentioned for the first time, the secret of his existence revealed, he walks out of a storm to interrupt a dinner party). The sincerity, the melodrama of such moments -- the operatic over-the-top "sweep" of many instances will probably drive some readers crazy, and made even this reader slow down, fall out of the rush of plot and ideas and energy.

--But such moments are few, and as often as they put the brakes on, equally often they were bound up in the book's many, many pleasures. This book's just a hair over 700 pages long, yet I flew through it, and there's little empty padding--it's not big out of mere ambition to be big, but out of a real and achieved sense of historical, political, and familial sweep. I enjoyed the hell out of my read, despite those twinges.

I'll close with an admission of my shameless appreciation for the novel's politics, and of its aesthetic decisions: at times I kind of wish it were more like The Wire, more sophisticated in its sweep and detail, more grounded in more far-reaching social examination, more subtle in its depiction of character. But how many people saw that show? And, instead, we get a big, popular, page-turning, and populist fiction which defines the necessity of unions, which details the longstanding historical crimes of poverty and race? Which exploits the many, many associations between the anti-anarchist furor of 1918 and the current state of American politics (while carefully drawing the lines between capital and the politics of fear)? We should have more fiction like this. (less)

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03/04/09

Runakiko rated it:

Read in December, 2008

I'm from Massachusetts so I expect I would like this book more than people who aren't from this neck of the woods. Lehane does a really good job of taking you back to 1918-19 so as to give you a very good sense of what it was like to live in those times. There is not a lot of action, but you become absorbed in the times as if you were there and could smell the smells, and feel the grimey environment of yesteryear.

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06/06/08

Sara rated it:

Read in June, 2008

recommended to Sara by: I picked it up at Book Expo
recommends it for: anyone

A masterful and sprawling epic, I found this novel to be extremely engaging and delicately crafted. Dennis Lehane was one of my favorite authors prior to reading this, so I might be a bit biased, but I believe it's his best work to date and, more importantly, a truly remarkable read. Lehane's breadth of knowledge on the subject (I'm being intentionally cryptic, I don't want to spoil anyone) is impressive, to say the least and you'll be hooked until the very last sentence.

It's a fami...more

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03/20/09

Tony rated it:

Read in March, 2009

This sweeping historical novel covers a very particular time and place: Boston in the era just after World War I. The Irish are consolidating their power and taking control of the city, the Italian and Slavic immigrants are the new pariahs - and blacks, well, they are scorned by everyone. The great influenza epidemic of 1918, the Boston Police strike of 1919, "Boshevik" workers groups, and the resentment of the old guard Beacon Hill Brahmins toward the Irish ascendency - all combine to...more

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02/27/09

Tony rated it:

bookshelves: fiction-mainstream

Read in February, 2009

Lehane, Dennis. THE GIVEN DAY. (2008). *****. Be prepared to spend a few nights with this novel from Lehane. It is a long, long book. When you have finished it, however, you will realize that you have just read Lehane’s best bool. It is the story of an Irish policeman in Boston in the year 1919. It is also the story of a black man on the run from the law who ends up in Boston as a servant to the policeman’s family on Beacon Hill. 1919 was a turbulent year, and Lehane uses all of the...more

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02/05/09

Bookmarks Magazine added it

Lehane illustrates impressive versatility at crossing genres in this grand historical novel. Still, while the most enthusiastic reviewers compared Given Day to the best by Doctorow and Dreiser, more cited it as a sweeping��but at points horribly overstuffed��novel. Certainly, Lehane did extraordinary research on the xenophobia, racial tensions, and labor unions of the era for his compelling set pieces. However, some of his efforts at recreating that history��such as introducing figures like E

...more

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01/11/09

Bonnie Serov rated it:

Read in December, 2008

The Given Day is in that class of books my husband affectionately refers to as ‘widow makers’. Once I started reading this book, I was quickly immersed in the story and the rest of the world simply dissolved. The Given Day documents a time of violence and struggle for workers rights which saw the birth of the union movement. Against this historical and political landscape, Lehane writes a powerful and moving family epic with sharp and well researched narrative and surprising cameo use of his...more The Given Day is in that class of books my husband affectionately refers to as ‘widow makers’. Once I started reading this book, I was quickly immersed in the story and the rest of the world simply dissolved. The Given Day documents a time of violence and struggle for workers rights which saw the birth of the union movement. Against this historical and political landscape, Lehane writes a powerful and moving family epic with sharp and well researched narrative and surprising cameo use of historical figures such as Babe Ruth and J Edgar Hoover as pivotal character points.

Set in Boston in 1919, The Given Day follows the turmoil of events following the return of the WWI war veterans. During this time, the Spanish Influenza, escalating terrorism and the talk of prohibition plagued America. Danny Coughlin, a police officer and the eldest son of one of Boston’s legendary police captains, empathizes with the people’s grievances. Living and working in the predominantly Italian neighbourhoods of the North End, he is faced with the daily assault of the political dissent. He sees first hand the effect of poor working conditions have on those around him. In his own profession, Danny’s pay is below the poverty line and despite long shifts and often dangerous conditions; there is no compensation for his colleagues in the event of injury or disability. When he joins the union, he finds fierce opposition from his father who considers those who join unions as ‘Bolshevik’s and anarchists’ and the stage is set for a showdown between the two.

Another central character in the book is Luther Laurence, a coloured talented baseball player, on the run over a nightclub shooting in Oklahoma. Leaving his wife and unborn child, Luther flees to Boston where he finds employment in the Coughlin household. There he befriends Danny and the Coughlin Irish maid Nora. His troubles however are not far behind as he finds himself once again having to settle scores with old and new enemies.

Lehane’s style is impressive by the way the words leap out of the page with great energy and passion, bringing history alive in their punchy deliverance. I found myself savoring this book, not wanting it to end, and feeling a sharp edge of regret once the end finally came.
This book confirmed Lehane as one of my favourite authors. I can't wait to read more of his books.(less)

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12/16/08

Lori Eskridge rated it:

Read in December, 2008

This is a book that is hard to put down. It is a historical fiction that takes place in 1918 and 1919 mostly in Boston, MA. There is a real person in history in it. Babe Ruth is featured. He played with the Boston Red Sox when they won the world series in 1918. The book deals with class warfare and prejudice. There is an African American man named Luther who first meets Babe Ruth and actually plays baseball with him and other players of the Red Sox. Babe Ruth treated him like an equal w...more

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05/07/09

Jessica rated it:

bookshelves: historical-fiction

Read in April, 2009

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time, and I am not usually a fan of historical fiction. Dennis Lehane is best known for dark detective novels, but he takes a detour here and writes about two young men, one black and one white, in post-WWI Boston. No sooner is the city bouncing back from a flu pandemic when labor unrest accelerates into a police strike and mob violence. Lehane weaves race relations, class struggles, union history and a family saga into a tight narrative that ...more

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05/04/09

Shannon rated it:

Read in May, 2009

recommended to Shannon by: Jason

I've read a few books by Dennis Lehane, but stopped reading his work a few years back after a book about a child's kidnapping that was just too much for me to bear. I decided to read this book because it was a departure from his modern-day Boston series. The story in The Given Day takes place in a few locations, but Boston is the center of the action. Set just after WWI, it was thought provoking in many ways.

While thought-provoking, it is not an uplifting book. I found myself won...more I've read a few books by Dennis Lehane, but stopped reading his work a few years back after a book about a child's kidnapping that was just too much for me to bear. I decided to read this book because it was a departure from his modern-day Boston series. The story in The Given Day takes place in a few locations, but Boston is the center of the action. Set just after WWI, it was thought provoking in many ways.

While thought-provoking, it is not an uplifting book. I found myself wondering whether our country has made any progress at all in the last 100 years as I read this book. We are now, as we were then, a country of "haves" and "have nots". Where I do find some solace is that even the have nots in our country now have more than their peers 100 years ago. Still, it broke my heart to see the similarities between then and now.

This book was published just before the bottom fell out of our economy, but it couldn't be more timely to read it now since The Given Day shows the early days of the Great Depression (even though none of the characters know what is coming). The impact of sky-rocketing cost of living was stunning.

I guess there were a few things I was hoping for but didn't get from this book. Even with the different temporal setting, Lehane's writing style was the same - fast-paced with a good feel for the mood of the city and its occupants. I wanted a bit more depth in individual characters and the ending was surprisingly satisfying given the overall bleakness of the book. While I did desperately want things to work out for the two main characters, I'm not sure they really should have. A little heartbreak in a book is a good thing in some cases.

If you're interested in history, but like it wrapped in an easy to read package, this is a good book. I did learn a lot about historical figures that I had essentially no prior knowledge of (Calvin Coolidge, for one) and it helped me understand the mood of our country immediately following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.(less)

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04/18/09

Nancy (Hrdcovers) rated it:

Read in January, 2008

On any given day, most any author can turn out a good book. But it's the great authors who consistently turn out great books. (I'll forgive Lehane for Shutter Island).

This book was obviously a labor of love for Lehane and I believe that he grew up hearing these stories of Bostonian history at the feet of his grandfather. In doing some research on Lehane, I read that he is the son of a union man, which explains a lot about this book and his desire to tell this story. As the daughter ...more On any given day, most any author can turn out a good book. But it's the great authors who consistently turn out great books. (I'll forgive Lehane for Shutter Island).

This book was obviously a labor of love for Lehane and I believe that he grew up hearing these stories of Bostonian history at the feet of his grandfather. In doing some research on Lehane, I read that he is the son of a union man, which explains a lot about this book and his desire to tell this story. As the daughter of a union man myself, I can totally relate to this. Whether or not you believe in unions, I think Lehane put the question out there quite masterfully by relating the story of the Boston Police strike of 1919.

To call this strike a moral dilemma would be an understatement. You have a police force who was underpaid at a time when the cost of living had gone up over 70%. On top of that, many times they were forced to sleep at the station which was filthy and pest infested. Other laborers were living well post WWI, yet no one would give these civil servants the time of day. When the possibility of joining a union came to fruition, it seemed like the light at the end of the tunnel. Finally these workers would be paid equal pay for what they did. Unfortunately, that was not meant to be and a strike ensued causing civil mayhem throughout the streets of Boston. So the real question then became, "Do those in charge of the safety of the public have a right to strike"?

That is the underlying story of Lehane's novel. But the real story, behind the story, is one of the loss of innocence. We meet Danny Coughlin, a young cop in Boston's North End, who realizes that his father, a police captain, isn't as aboveboard as he always thought him to be. We're also introduced to Luther Laurence, whom we first meet on the baseball field with none other than Babe Ruth. He gets involved with some shifty people in Oklahoma and his innocent world comes to an abrupt halt. On top of that, we have a government that promises fairness and equality above all else.....that's an eye opener to all those innocents in 1919. Are the unions the only thing that can possibly bring equality to these people? This is a question Lehane asks but does not answer. You be the judge. Danny Coughlin's official age of innocence will come to an end when he believes the union is the answer and leads his men on a journey that will show them there is no innocence but only guilt in the eyes of an ungrateful and corrupt city.

This year (1918) that Lehane chooses to portray ( the year leading up to the Boston police strike) is one strife with so many bad occurrences. Lehane covers them all.....an economically destroyed country post WWI, domestic terrorism fraught with anarchists and the Spanish flu pandemic just to list a few. He threw so many events into this book that I was surprised he didn't have someone singing Irving Berlin's God Bless America which he wrote in 1918. I love reading these historical fiction novels especially when they're about events in history that I had little or no previous knowledge.

This is an epic novel about political and social upheaval and the right of the haves and the have nots. I've heard that this was meant to be part of a trilogy so it will be interesting to see if this pans out. It's not lost on the reader that there were so many parallels to today's political and social problems. It reminds me of the words in Corinne Rae Bailey's song, "Put Your Records On"...."the more things seem to change, the more things stay the same".

So once again, Lehane hits it out of the ballpark. Which reminds me....I didn't enjoy the Babe Ruth sections of the book. Like his friend George Pellecanos, he can't help writing for men and I guess this was his shout-out to all the baseball fans out there....especially the Red Sox ones. (less)

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04/11/09

Jon rated it:

Lehane is a wonderfully vivid writer, with strong characters, believable dialogue, and tense, dramatic situations. This one is set primarily in Boston of 1918-1919, with a family of Irish policemen taking various positions for and against the upcoming police strike. There are two main characters, Danny (one of the sons in the Irish family) and Luther, a black man from Ohio who had moved to Tulsa, gotten involved in the negro underworld there, killed a man, and fled to Boston. Both have their wea...more

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03/17/09

Catherine rated it:

Read in December, 2008

This is a very big book and there's a lot to say about it. This historical novel is Dickensian in its interweaving of plot and characters, which all lead to the Police Officers' strike in Boston in 1919. The male characters are very richly depicted. We see them inside and out, and live their point of view. The protaganist, Danny Coughlin, is the heir apparent to an Irish Catholic Boston Police Department Lieutenant, Thomas Coughlin, who has the natural conservatism and prejudices of his time and...more This is a very big book and there's a lot to say about it. This historical novel is Dickensian in its interweaving of plot and characters, which all lead to the Police Officers' strike in Boston in 1919. The male characters are very richly depicted. We see them inside and out, and live their point of view. The protaganist, Danny Coughlin, is the heir apparent to an Irish Catholic Boston Police Department Lieutenant, Thomas Coughlin, who has the natural conservatism and prejudices of his time and heritage. But Danny rejects the old values and we get to see his character, his views, his introspection. The other major characters, a black man named Luther Laurence, a recent immigrant named Nora, and the bad guy, Eddie McKenna. The women are more lightly sketched--we never see inside Nora's head, or get her history. Luther's wife we see only from his point of view. Thomas' wife, Ellen, is just a sketch.
The historic events and thinking of the time is well researched and reflected in the characters and their actions. The times were similar to our own. There was an irrational branding of all immigrants as bad in the minds of the majority, especially slavic and Russian immigrants. Terrorism from anarchists was a real fear. There were real bombings, real injuries and death, caused by anarchists, but the emotional reaction lost all focus on the perpetrators and anyone who was a recent immigrant from Russia or slavic countries was suspect. Normal dissent was feared. Union activity was subversive.
This was the end of the first World War, the world was suffering from the Spanish flu pandemic which killed 18 million people during its two year spread throughout the world, and immigrants were pouring in to the United States as the economy was faltering. The Boston Police department had not had a raise since 1903, but unionization of essential government services was especially subversive.
Given the complexity of the times, its natural that the book takes awhile to lay the foundation for the main story lines and characters. The author's style does allow you to immerse yourself in the times, the people, the events, but if he could have eliminated about 10% of the metaphors and added some character to the women, I would have liked it better. It was, as a good friend of mine said, very metaphor-full. Here's an example:
"The night was moonless, the air so raw it found his gums. ...He drove back to the city with a windshield grimed by salt and his own fear drying into his scalp." There's a little too much of that.
On the other hand, there were two bad guys, Eddie McKenna, and Tessa Ficara, and we know exactly what Eddie is thinking, and how he got the way he is. We never see inside Tessa's head. We could have used a little more introspection on the part of the women.
But all in all I was absorbed in the story, not very distracted by the excess of imagery, and only disappointed in the women after the fact. So, I would very much recommend the book as a great and entertaining depiction of a pivotal event in the history of the country, not just Boston, and for the feel of the times, the real and unfounded fears that justifiably or not changed Boston forever. The parallels to our own time make the lessons that could be learned from that time important. (less)

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12/12/08

Lori rated it:

Read in December, 2008

This is a very engrossing book that was hard to put down. It is a historical novel that takes place in 1918 and 1919 and takes place mostly in Boston, MA. It chronicles the police department and the officers' struggle for better pay and working conditions. At the same time it follows Babe Ruth and the Boston Red Sox. It is interesting that there is political unrest in one chapter with the police department as well as workers at businesses. The next chapter follows Babe Ruth trying to find a...more

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06/28/09

Paula rated it:

bookshelves: novels

What can I say? A novel to read on vacation, perhaps--plot and character driven, historically set immediately post WWI in Boston in a milieu of Irish cops, Italian "anarchists" and African-American supporters of the new NAACP. Leads up to the Boston Police Strike of 1919. Along the way an unlikely friendship develops among Danny Coughlin, an Irish cop, son and godson of two of the most powerful police officers in the department; Nora, housekeeper in the Coughlin household, whose past i...more

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