The Literary Blog Hop is an inter-blog activity, powered by The Blue Bookcase. Last time, I missed it because of professional engagement I took with the site, the blogger fumble and due to some travel also. This week, I'm going to make up for it. The latest prompt is:
Talk about one author that you love and why his or her writing is unique. Please be specific.
I'm like that annoying street salesman in Marrakesh about this, but I love Dennis Lehane. His novels can be graded from "very good" to "I think I just had a stroke". The man just cannot write a bad novel. How is that so? How can a writer rack up so many successes one after the other, while keeping his pants on and his dignity intact?
I think it has to do with the fact that he's such a purist. Think of him as the Bruce Lee of contemporary literature. Nothing matters to him, but the purity of movement. The story. I have never read an author that doesn't bother with anything that success brings. Ego, posterity, target demographic. He leaves all that at the door, to try and build the best story possible. Lehane is not very chatty about his writing habits, but I can picture him writing bare-chested, on an old school typewriter in a Bushido-like cabin in the mountains*.
His stories are the darkest stories I have ever read. Once again, because they are so pure and hit a special place, a universal place that everybody can relate to. It's darker than every horror novel I've ever read. There are no vampires in Mystic River. No werewolf, no blood-thirsty serial killer, there are barely even guns if you compare with your average crime novels. All you have is a unexplainable tragedy and people scrambling to gather themselves and try to understand. There is no voluntary flare. No "Freudian" characters or no insight on the post-colonial condition of the Irishmen in the U.S. Yet it's incredibly deep. As a reader, you're asked to be patient and compassionate in trying to piece back together the lives of three young kids who were separated by greed and lust. Broken innocence is mind-numbingly simple, yet it's a terrific premise for a crime novel.
Darkness, Take My Hand is another paramount of darkness in Lehane's body of work**. It's another story that's very pure. His understanding of the chaotic nature of crime helped him build this incredibly complex story where the murders come with a heavy history behind them. Sometimes, the smallest detail can make the worse things happen. Like the proverbial butterfly wing flap that causes hurricanes in another hemisphere, in the chaos theory. His weakest novel (that I found) The Given Day was not BAD per se, I still enjoyed some parts. I wrote it off as a love letter to Boston. There are a lot of era details and it chokes the story left and right. But the moments where the characters are left with the possibility to shine on their own are unforgettable, as always.
* OK, it's somewhat of MY own fantasy of writing, but you get the point. I look up to the guy like he was Joe Montana.
** With that said, I'm aware his title choices for his novels have to be his biggest weakness.