Right now, Dennis Lehane’s incredible Small Mercies is on sale. Set in Boston in the summer of 1974 and focused on the city’s violent response to the forced integration of the city’s schools, it’s not for the sensitive reader. The main character, Mary Pat, is a bitter, alcoholic, racist who, when her daughter vanishes, takes on the Irish mob, the police, and, from her perspective, all of Boston to find her child.
Our world was, obviously, a different place in 1974. Much of America was comfortable with and unashamed about their biases. It was an era where kids–I was one–grew up telling dumb Polack jokes, where the n-word was commonly used, and the idea of a same sex relationship was treated with, at best, mocking humor and at worst, violence. On the yellow buses I took home from schools, kids taunted other kids about their weight, their dentition, and their ethnicity and the bus driver paid not a whit of attention. (When I got braces in 5th grade, the kids on my bus in Bloomfield Hills chanted for what seemed like miles Tinsel teeth Duck! Tinsel Teeth Duke. My best friend Suzie, who’d not yet gotten her teeth fixed, heard Buck tooth Ribbit, Ribbit, Ribbit. Buck Tooth Ribbit, Ribbit, Ribbit.)
In this book, Lehane writes Boston as it was. As he began writing it, he was well aware that the language he wished to use would, for some, be unacceptable. He, however, felt it was necessary to tell the story he wished to. In this incisive interview at Shondaland, he said:
That was the very first discussion me and my editor ever had. I said, “I’m not dialing this back. I’ll modulate it. I appreciate the need for nuance in some of this, but I’m not dialing it back fully.” What we did was, we went in, and we looked at any place where it wasn’t clear that these words were coming from Mary Pat’s consciousness; they weren’t coming from the authorial voice. That was the key. We were very scrupulous about that. I’m glad we did it. I have no issues with that. I know this book is going to be brutal to read, and it’s going to be shocking to see those words. People are going to have a lot of trouble with some of it. But, man, my job is not to write to your safe space. If you can’t take it, don’t read the book. Simple as that. But it’s important that people see what the quiet part [of racism] looks like. People don’t understand that this is still happening in very uncoded language. And if you don’t have a real look at that, how are you supposed to even remotely figure out how to address it?
It will surprise not one of AAR’s regular readers to hear that I huzzahed when I read this. I do not, either personally or as the publisher here, believe it is an author’s responsibility to write prose that makes readers feel safe, unappalled, or validated. Cranky old lady that I am, I feel that safe spaces let us stay in our own worlds and that can stop us from growing and changing when we face challenges. Being safe makes it harder to adapt to our chaotic and often dangerous world. As Alex Honnold recently wrote for the NYT, being fearful of something helps us differentiate between real, physical danger and general anxiety. We can excise all the offensive language or characters we wish, determinedly live removed from society’s evils, but that doesn’t stop the world from being full of horrors. I’ve always felt that confronting that which offends me in books makes me more able to challenge it in person.
But, as usual, that’s just me and I am well aware that what I think, in this case, is best is routinely difficult for other readers. What do you think? Do authors owe readers a safe space? Should those who write voices, characters, words, or plots we find egregious be silenced? Should readers be informed, prior to reading, about all in the book that make be hard to parse? And, if so, why?
