‘Since We Fell’ takes readers down dark roads
By the hundredth page of Dennis Lehane’s new novel, Rachel Childs has solved the paternal mystery that sets her story in motion — but with more than 300 pages to go, the real mystery begins.
How has her damaged childhood, at the will and whim of a bitterly withholding mother, prepared her for the perils of adulthood, the ups and downs of professional life, the risks and rewards of marriage?
As posed by Lehane — whose muscular prose has powered such hits as Mystic River, Shutter Is
land and Gone Baby Gone — these questions take on a familiar Bostonian accent in Since We Fell (Ecco, 432 pp., out of **** four). This time he writes from the perspective of a young woman who hunts the truth to her breaking point, and to an even darker beyond.
In the process, Lehane aligns his Rachel Childs with the neo-feminist anti-heroines of such blockbusters as Gillian Flynn’s
Gone Girl or Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train. Since We Fell seems calibrated to follow them and Lehane’s other best sellers to the big screen.
On the page, the surfeit of plot twists and emotional baggage are buoyed by Lehane’s hard-boiled lyricism and peerless feel for New England noir.
Rachel’s husband Brian, though, is at the center of her quest. She meets him when he’s a private eye too honest to drain her bank account in a fruitless search for her unknown father. Before they meet again, Rachel will take on the world — first as a journalist for The Boston Globe and then as a TV reporter covering Haiti’s earthquake. This brings out the best in Lehane’s writing (“… the bodies burning like sacrificial appeasements, gray sulfur roiling amid the oily black smoke, the body within already an abstraction.”).
Haiti’s trauma becomes Rachel’s trauma, and her on-air meltdown derails her career. Back in Boston, she retreats, racked by panic attacks, until she bumps into Brian, whose low-key charm and care bring her back from the edge. But it isn’t long after they marry that Rachel must confront the fact that Brian may not be, well … Brian.
There are a few possible novels in this one: Rachel’s search for identity; the story of a privileged young journalist taken out of herself and her monoculture in a nightmare Haiti; scenes from a marriage tested by anxiety and ambition.
Instead, Lehane seems to shuffle his deck of plot cards as the narrative lurches, settling into a grinding action-crime procedural involving a gold mine scam, clichéd hit men, gruesome murders and preposterous resurrections.
By the climax, Rachel has gone from shut-in to scuba-diving ninja, admirably self-reliant, but the moral clarity her character was arcing toward becomes a muddle of marital deceit and sappy romance. Lehane’s goal for his heroine may have been ambitious, but — like Brian — he lets her down.