Dennis Lehane’s ‘World Gone By’

Before the first narrative break, however, the reader also learns that Joe’s life path has largely been determined by his and a partner’s robbery of a gangster’s casino, an event that eerily parallels the predicament of a man who approaches him at the party. Bobo Frechetti wants Coughlin to return the money Frechetti has stolen from a mob transport firm. Coughlin agrees to this, noting that Frechetti is now indebted to him under the threat of a curse far more serious than “the kind you get from an Italian grandmother and her mustache in New Jersey.”

And what is a seven-year-old kid in wildly outdated clothes doing on the lawn of the party site?

This is enough foundation for a Russian novel of perhaps 600 pages, though Lehane will not need nearly that many to pull together the fairly complex tale of an allegedly planned murder and its target.

Scheming and counter-scheming

In short order, the target of the hit is declared to be Coughlin. This isn’t presented to him, of course, but to a female gunsel about to serve a prison sentence for caving in her abusive husband’s head with a croquet mallet. The Coughlin hit makes no sense to the former Mrs. Theresa Del Fresco, though, because he is seemingly the ideal “retired” mob boss — still useful, still making money for his fellow thugs. A tale of scheming and counter-scheming seems to be setting up.

First, however, Lehane veers off the track in that direction to more fully consider Coughlin’s place in his new, “legitimate” universe. (In a way, his tale is like that of Michael Corleone in Godfather III, but with a lower, more human profile.) Before Coughlin even begins to seriously consider the threat against him that Mrs. Del Fresco reveals, he must consider a sermon about the loneliness of hell, his son suffering bigoted taunts about his mixed blood, and the fading memory of his dead wife, Graciela.

Study of a moral motherfucker

Although the novel is largely a character study of Coughlin, a man of serious vices and pretty much equally serious virtues described by another character as “the most moral motherfucking gangster I ever met,” it's also more. It is throughout an examination of the byzantine, vicious business of the mob, but also, at one point, a meditation on evil started by a man who immediately demonstrates that he’s a murderous sociopath. At another juncture, it’s a weirdly calculating love story in miniature. (Coughlin has made a cuckold of the mayor of Tampa.)

It would be unfair to say here anything further about the strange little boy who seems to follow Coughlin around or the outcome of the allegedly planned hit on him. Suffice it to say that, as with Lehane’s other novels, a lot is going on all at once. It is all presented, though, with an admirably direct inventiveness.

And if for nothing else, the book must be read for the Dr. Lenox “digression” about midway through. Lenox is the physician to Coughlin’s mob, and his alarming story immediately precedes his own comic theory about ghosts, which in turn is followed up by a most inventive twist on both. This is Lehane literally giving “shape” to Shakespeare’s “airy nothing,” then giving it “a local habitation and a name” as very few can.