One of the most blessedly introspective questions in existence; intensely important to personal growth and paramount to properly balancing our interaction with other human beings. One which prevents us from committing mistakes everywhere on the spectrum from minor social faux pas to great atrocity.
What if I'm wrong?
A sobering, humbling question to ask oneself. One which must be asked—or, at least, certainly deserves to be asked more than it is.
Not a popular question, of course. What if I'm wrong? douses all of our haughty, unearned self-righteousness like sand on a grease fire. Four words which heave us from our high horse and dump us right back in the muck with The Rabble™, one which no longer lets us confide in simple saying "people are stupid". It sets us back to square one and takes away a great deal of our strenuously accrued self-worth. Self-worth which, had we been looking in the mirror in the first place, we'd have realized has been built on a foundation of wet sand. Our great castles of ourselves, constructed with muck and lurching sickly to one side, about to collapse, only to be shored up with more mud and bullshit. We look at it and tell ourselves it's Neuschwanstein. Look! Look at how intelligent I am. How righteous and morally good, how altruistic. I am never unjustly unkind, I do not make mistakes. The people I hurt and speak down to deserve it.
I am not wrong.
This is the crux of the novel. The blind spots we sport as individuals, and how they're remedied via added perspective. People are irrational. Often they are stupid, petty, and violent; they kill and hurt others for the worst reasons. And the actions of the book serve only to reinforce this idea. But even considering this, our only cure for these tendencies of self-delusion are via cool self-critique, often with the help of those same irrational, stupid, petty, and violent peers and loved ones. Lone wolves often exhibit an inherent weakness in that they fall prey to believing their own bullshit. There are no checks and balances, and they sometimes make heinous mistakes which may have been remedied with just give more minutes of honest self-critique or added perspective. But such hard looks in the mirror are so much less desirable than a flimsy sense of self-righteous fury.
Being alone does not strengthen our resolve, it merely removes all the external influences which temper it, refine it. Being alone removes important blocks in the foundation of our decision-making process and gives us a false sense of confidence that this solution is the right one. It's not that there are no flaws or no better hypotheses when we are alone, it's that we are blind to them. Like a hive mind, our processing power shrinks when we have no other human beings to present us with alternate solutions or flaws in our perception.
But oftentimes, we don't want to see them. That makes it all so difficult. No, we want the bullshit solution. It's the easiest, the quickest, and, most importantly, it's the most satisfying. I don't want to know that the fine nuances of someone else's lived experience makes their opinions and their actions just as valid as my own, I want them to be a stupid, misguided fool with bad ideas—bad ideas which I can blast down with my own vitriol. They are in the wrong, you see. They are so in the wrong, and I am so hurt, that I am justified in committing violence against them.
Brendan knew about the truth. In most cases, it was just a matter of deciding whether you wanted to look it in the face or live with the comfort of ignorance and lies. And ignorance and lies were often underrated. Most people Brendan knew couldn't make it through the day without a saucerful of ignorance and a side of lies.
The bullshit solution. I get you, Jimmy Marcus. I wish I didn't, but I get you.
Mystic River is, above all else, a tragedy. The moving parts present are phenomenally well-orchestrated by Lehane. His character writing is superb; particularly his construction of Dave Boyle, the emotionally stunted crux on which the fates of the novel weave their tapestry. Dave's inner dialogue toward the end of the book felt, to me, like a genuine depiction of mental illness. Dave Boyle isn't a deranged lunatic, looking to burn Gotham and gleefully manipulate the bat man in his games. He's not the cannibalistic professor hiding behind a sheen of aristocracy and education in order to better facilitate his heinous crimes... Dave's just a guy. He's a guy with a wife and kid, a guy struggling to do better, struggling to be someone good but hopelessly hamstrung by past trauma. And god, it works. Because who hasn't been there? Who hasn't felt frustrated and inadequate, who hasn't genuinely wished to be better, more altruistic, more giving and loving, a better parent and a better significant other? Dave's struggles are a magnitude above anything I've ever dealt with, of course, because I've been fortunate in ways that he hasn't been. But nevertheless, Dave is someone everyone can identify with. Dave is universal. Life breaks us all, in the end—and sometimes in the during. We are all broken creatures with our own inadequacies and our own past trauma, and we are all trying to do better. We will all die trying to do better. We're all Dave. We're just not as Dave as Dave is.
I've never been that great a fan of Lehane's hard-boiled street-guy voice, but in Mystic River, particularly, it seems a bit more restrained. Lehane's capable of producing some great sentences and some phenomenal character writing, and this helps buffer the feeling that, sometimes, he's trying just a bit too hard to be the cool guy writing a cool narrative.
He woke up with the dream draining thickly from the back of his brainpan, the lint and fuzz of it clinging to the undersides of his eyelids and the upper layer of his tongue. He kept his eyes closed as the alarm clock kept beeping, hoping that it was merely a new dream, that he was still sleeping, that the beeping only beeped in his mind.
The harsh light above them caught her face, and Sean could see what she'd look like when she was much older - a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she never asked for.
He wanted to go on for hours. He wanted someone to listen to him and to understand that speech wasn't just about communicating ideas or opinions. Sometimes, it was about trying to convey whole human lives. And while you knew even before you opened your mouth that you'd fail, somehow the trying was what mattered. The trying was all you had.
It's not pretty, but ultimately the story goes where it needs to. I think most readers will be struck with a sense of, "Oh, shit... Please don't do this. Don't go where I think you're going..." It's fairly obvious the route the story will take by about the halfway mark, but the way Lehane brings it there shows skill. His dialogue is excellent and the inner monologues of his characters are consistently enjoyable. Their grief and their anger is palpable. None of it feels melodramatic or clichéd, which is a significant accomplishment considering how easy it is for the writer to go overboard from tragedy to melodrama.
Please note: Spoilers follow the image.
Ultimately, I felt the whodunit was rendered a bit unsatisfying by the conclusion of the novel. I had figured from about the mid-point of the book that Brendan's brother Ray was the one who had killed Katie, but I suspected his motive had been to keep his brother—the sole person in his life he loves, and his caretaker and sole confidant—near him, and to keep him from running away with Katie to Las Vegas. Perhaps this is still the case, but it's never outright stated by Ray or the police investigating the crime. It's left for the reader to infer, and the characters investigating the crime merely chalk it up to a random killing; two psychopathic teenagers out to shoot somebody for no good reason. I'm not sure if Lehane expects us to infer Ray's motives or not, but I found the in-text explanation to be relatively unsatisfying.
Additionally, I felt Brendan's and Katie's relationship could have used a bit of added backstory. What was it Katie saw in Brendan? Brendan in Katie? Was it merely that Brendan wanted an escape from his awful family situation? That doesn't really fly for Katie; she has a large family who loves her and she has a future. So what was it that attracted these two people so strongly to one another?
Ultimately, these are relatively minor gripes. Mystic River is a really good book. It's strongly themed and it leaves you with questions to gnaw on, but it's also a superb slow-burn mystery-thriller with well-defined characters which, once it gets going in its second act, doesn't really take its foot off the gas.
Lehane's good. He knows how to entertain, but perhaps more importantly, he has ideas and he has questions. I look forward to reading more of his stuff.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
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