Review: "Since We Fell" by Dennis Lehane

I wait for a new Dennis Lehane book the way others are waiting for the new Star Wars movie to come out this December, and with his new novel, Since We Fell, he does not disappoint. Not counting the novelization of the movie The Drop, this is his first standalone novel since completing the momentous Coughlin trilogy, and it was nice to see him step away from a period piece and give his readers a modern story that has more in line with something like Mystic River than Live By Night, where a person or persons average life is upended by scary and disturbing circumstances. But here Lehane does something a little different and unique and it is what sets this book apart from anything else he has done, and it is why I love his work so much. And he accomplishes this with his same knack for character development and plot driven narrative that make his books so enjoyable and the themes he is obsessed with shine through more brightly. With the character of Rachel Childs, he presents what is easily his most tragic and damaged character, one not broken by violent tendencies but instead by a fatalism fostered by her upbringing, a severely low self-esteem and an intense loneliness that burns white hot on every page. What sets this book apart as I stated earlier is its first section, which takes place between the years 1979 and 2010, deals with Rachel’s life before the main events from the novel. Rachel is born in 1979 to Elizabeth Childs, an author of a book on marriage whose own love life is used as a tool to control Rachel. She does okay in school, but is haunted by the specter of her unknown father and a constant feeling of being unwanted and displaced. This is a brilliant section and is among the best Lehane has put of the page to date, which is saying something. It has many heartbreaking revelatory moments, such as Rachel’s very public mental breakdown and the sad truth behind her birth, which only reinforces the isolation she feels in the world. It feels like the beating heart at the center of this 418 page novel. It greatly informs and puts into context what happens next when Rachel meets Brian, who played a peripheral role in the first section, and falls in love with him. I won’t spoil what happens next, but I will say that once Rachel sees Brian in a place he shouldn’t be, her life takes a strange turn, one filled with danger and death. The other noir title I was thinking of most while reading this was Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place, where the darkness is of the human heart and not of the night. This book also shares that movie’s sense of impending sad doom, from its final action set piece to it’s strange ending, where one key event is told to us but is never seen, and something was kept that was supposedly sent away, and the ambiguity of it all is something I simply can’t shake. While not a good entry point into Lehane’s increasingly growing body of work (I’d start with the collection Coronado personally), but this is another homerun by one of America’s finest talents.  

Rating: 5/5