Dennis Lehane so rules the neighborhood of Noir ("Nwaaah," as we say in Boston) that he gets street credit for work he didn't write, like "The Departed" and "The Town." But does the author of "Mystic River," "Gone Baby Gone" and the new Moonlight Mile get credit enough for a body of artistic work now far beyond private-eye or "genre" of any kind -- way beyond his gift for Boston-accented dialog?
Our conversation is about the murkier depths of his Gothic novel and movie "
," with Leonardo diCaprio as a U.S. Marshall apparently trapped in a Boston Harbor lock-up for the criminally insane in the 1950s. I think it's Lehane's version of the War on Terror. He says it's more nearly his answer to the Patriot Act, his reliving of the Cold War and the repressions it licensed in America. "All past is prologue," he remarks. "Noir is without a doubt the ultimate genre of 'you cannot outrun the past'... That's 'Mystic River': you cannot outrun your nature. You cannot escape the past." "Shutter Island" in that sense turns out to be Dennis Lehane's recapitulation of McCarthyism (an American Stalinism): those good old days when the CIA experimented with LSD and other psychotropic drugs on Federal prisoners and other unsuspecting guinea pigs. It was a time, he's saying, that foreshadowed the suspension of
habeas corpus
and the tortures of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib in the George Bush years.
We are testing a favorite Open Source premise that the most observant anthropologists and historians of our own time may be novelists. In his hometown he is riveted on "how this new Gilded Age is going to fall out. People are being priced out of Charlestown... out of Southie... It's kind of horrifying... There seem to be only a few people who are worried that we're selling out the entire country -- that everything's gone; that the America we knew growing up is just vanishing... Isn't anybody paying attention? There's no unions left; they destroyed them. They went after the unions and then outsourced everything. So now there's no jobs left, and they've got the people that have lost their jobs, lost their houses, lost everything, believing that the reason they've lost it is everything but the real reasons. And everybody just seems to say: fine, as long as I can get this for three bucks a can at Walmart, I'm okay. I think we're just watching America fiddle as it burns."
Dennis Lehane is a writer who keeps expanding into new themes and new media, from his original cop stories to historical fiction, The Given Day ("Shades of Doctorow and Dreiser...," Janet Maslin wrote in the Times), then long-form television in "The Wire," and back to social realism and the adventures of PIs Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro in Moonlight Mile. He's been well served along the way by three tough self-inflicted rules. First, take no job that could divert him from his writing ambition; so he's been a security guard and he's parked cars, but was never tempted by law school or teaching. Second, sell the work to artists, never to corporations; so he finally yielded the movie rights to "Mystic River" to Clint Eastwood; and "Shutter Island" to Martin Scorsese. And third: undertake only those new projects that "on some level scare the hell out of me. It's got to be something I'm afraid I can't do."
Listen to our long conversation over dinner the other night:
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