Sean O'Brien and The Given Day
(Cross posted on One Bite at a Time.)
Sean O’Brien has written a rambling, somewhat disjointed piece for The Times Online titled “Laws of the Thriller: Sean O’Brien on the ups and downs of thriller....” (Thanks to Sarah Weinman’s terrific blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, for making me aware of this. While we’re at it, Happy Birthday, Sarah.) Where “laws” comes in is debatable, and O’Brien seems more interested in finding downs than ups, but he’s a critic. He may consider it part of his job to be controversial, and all of his criticisms are of matters about which reasonable minds may differ.
Almost all.
He devotes a good-sized paragraph to Dennis Lehane’s latest, The Given Day, which I read a few weeks ago. He makes several comments I disagree with, all of which fall under the “reasonable minds” disclaimer above. There is, however, one comment that makes me wonder if he read the same book I did:
“…the political dimension of the book – Boston is teeming with socialist, Marxists, syndicalists, Wobblies and anarchist bombers – causes Lehane some anxiety. He repeatedly takes an oath of loyalty to capital by denouncing and deriding the ideas and the characters of the Left.”
Where O’Brien sees this anxiety in Lehane’s writing escapes me. The book clearly is on the side of the workers. Comments to the effect that the Communists and Socialists spend too much time drinking and arguing are in the context of law enforcement’s efforts to lump those groups together with anarchists as “bomb throwers.” The point of the description is to show the relative harmlessness of the political groups when compared to the violence advocated, and perpetrated, by the anarchists.
Lehane makes this clear by depicting the efforts of law enforcement and the political establishment to associate these “subversive” groups as a way to maintain the status quo of the social order in place as the book begins. Lehane has been quoted as describing his politics as “left of Canada;” nothing in The Given Day would cast doubt on that. Class warfare is a key theme throughout the book, and it’s plain where his sympathies are. It’s one thing to differ about quality, something else to get the point of the book so completely wrong when the author has made it so plain. O’Brien might as well say Steinbeck took the side of the banks in The Grapes of Wrath.
I’ll confess to being in the tank for Dennis Lehane’s work since I read A Drink Before the War; I think The Given Day is brilliant, worthy of the five year wait. That doesn’t mean I’m right. On the other hand, O’Brien’s comment in a respected publication has missed the mark by such a wide margin that one must wonder if The Times has joined the Obama Administration as organizations in need of an overhaul to their vetting processes.
Sean O’Brien has written a rambling, somewhat disjointed piece for The Times Online titled “Laws of the Thriller: Sean O’Brien on the ups and downs of thriller....” (Thanks to Sarah Weinman’s terrific blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, for making me aware of this. While we’re at it, Happy Birthday, Sarah.) Where “laws” comes in is debatable, and O’Brien seems more interested in finding downs than ups, but he’s a critic. He may consider it part of his job to be controversial, and all of his criticisms are of matters about which reasonable minds may differ.
Almost all.
He devotes a good-sized paragraph to Dennis Lehane’s latest, The Given Day, which I read a few weeks ago. He makes several comments I disagree with, all of which fall under the “reasonable minds” disclaimer above. There is, however, one comment that makes me wonder if he read the same book I did:
“…the political dimension of the book – Boston is teeming with socialist, Marxists, syndicalists, Wobblies and anarchist bombers – causes Lehane some anxiety. He repeatedly takes an oath of loyalty to capital by denouncing and deriding the ideas and the characters of the Left.”
Where O’Brien sees this anxiety in Lehane’s writing escapes me. The book clearly is on the side of the workers. Comments to the effect that the Communists and Socialists spend too much time drinking and arguing are in the context of law enforcement’s efforts to lump those groups together with anarchists as “bomb throwers.” The point of the description is to show the relative harmlessness of the political groups when compared to the violence advocated, and perpetrated, by the anarchists.
Lehane makes this clear by depicting the efforts of law enforcement and the political establishment to associate these “subversive” groups as a way to maintain the status quo of the social order in place as the book begins. Lehane has been quoted as describing his politics as “left of Canada;” nothing in The Given Day would cast doubt on that. Class warfare is a key theme throughout the book, and it’s plain where his sympathies are. It’s one thing to differ about quality, something else to get the point of the book so completely wrong when the author has made it so plain. O’Brien might as well say Steinbeck took the side of the banks in The Grapes of Wrath.
I’ll confess to being in the tank for Dennis Lehane’s work since I read A Drink Before the War; I think The Given Day is brilliant, worthy of the five year wait. That doesn’t mean I’m right. On the other hand, O’Brien’s comment in a respected publication has missed the mark by such a wide margin that one must wonder if The Times has joined the Obama Administration as organizations in need of an overhaul to their vetting processes.
Views: 9
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Comment by I. J. Parker on February 14, 2009 at 4:32am
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Okay, I stand corrected on the genre. But 700 pages? As for Lehane (I'm not a fan, as you may have guessed), I read his first one and SHUTTER ISLAND. The first one was a long time ago and I have a dim memory it involved a missing child. This book was seriously flawed in Lehane's imagery (which simply didn't work). S.I. was a stylistic improvement, but I couldn't really warm up to the plot. It is simply a thriller. I haven't read MYSTIC RIVER. It didn't sound like my kind of book. Lehane is very lucky!
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Comment by Dana King on February 14, 2009 at 12:49am
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Ingrid, your comment, "No wonder, people who started out as mere storytellers and made good (Lehane for example) shifted quickly to something far more admirable: literary fiction." makes it sound like Lehane paid his dues doing scut work until he could find a "real" job. A Drink Before the War is not a modest attempt at anything; none of his Kenzie-Gennaro books are. He clearly thinks their as admirable as his "literary fiction" or he wouldn't be returning to them after the success of The GIven Day.
Maybe he wouldn't have sold The GIven Day without his track record; it's hard to say. I've read 700 page literary novels that got published and promoted that weren't nearly as good.
By the way, the book is fiction: the non-fiction aspects (police strike, Red Sox winning the 1918 World Series, some of the characters) are used only as the bacjdrop for the story he's telling about this family of policemen and a black man on the rn from a murder charge on Oklahoma.
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Dana, I still think that we try with a modest attempt first, and when that pays off in a big way, we feel that we can now be the artists we've always wanted to be. Or, in other words: Once you reach bestseller status, you can sell anything. I have my doubts that Lehane could have got the 700 page historical account (non-fiction apparently) published when he had no name.
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The Given Day is not a thriller; why O'Brien included it in his discussion could be another post of its own.
On the other hand, it is anything but dull. He meshes his fictional characters and story well with real people and events. I never felt it drag through the entire 700 pages, and I generally don't care for books that long. All of the writing characteristics that made the Kenzie-Gennaro books and Mystic River work so well are put to good use, and his chops keep getting better. Reading many of the first- and second-generation Irish characters' dialog puts the accent in your head without resorting to phonetic spelling. It was one of those rare books that I was sorry had ended.
Ingrid, you make it sound as though he was just paying his dues writing mysteries until he could write something he considered "worthwhile." It should be noted he's currently working on the sixth Kenzie-Gennaro mystery. I don;t think he's shifted at all. This was a story he wanted to tell, and this was the manner in which he thought it could best be told.
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Just went to read the article (thanks for the link). It's really a rather good article with some insights. The law of the thriller seems to be that the getting there is better than the destination. But he also deals with the dreaded term "literary". And since I've been identified as a "storyteller" by my agent, I now wonder if she should have been given my "literary thriller" to handle, for handling there has been none. In the library, the storytellers are in the mystery section. The thriller writers are shelved under fiction. They are the ones with the large, fat, shiny hardcovers. No wonder, people who started out as mere storytellers and made good (Lehane for example) shifted quickly to something far more admirable: literary fiction. (Yes, I'm sneering a bit here).
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Now why does this Lehane book sound utterly dull to me. A thriller???
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Comment by John McFetridge on February 13, 2009 at 7:57am
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Now I really have to read The Given Day.
But what I really want to see is the cage match between Dennis Lehane and Tom Clancy ;)
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