Order WORLD GONE BY here
(also reviewed)
Order DARKNESS, TAKE MY HAND here
Order MOONLIGHT MILE here
Order THE GIVEN DAY here
Order LIVE BY NIGHT here
Order THE DROP here
I can only imagine what it is, to be Michael Jordan. Every night, you go out there to do what you love more than anything in the world, and you're bound to better than anybody else at it, otherwise you're disappointing people who traveled and paid hard-earned money to see you perform. I like to think of Dennis Lehane as the Michael Jordan of crime fiction because he is so naturally better than any other authors I know at it. I've reviewed the entire Coughlin Series for this blog and found myself to be on the fence about it. Has Dennis Lehane become a victim of the tremendous expectations that come with every new release of his? I don't know, but I thought WORLD GONE BY was the weakest effort of the Coughlin Series and left more questions questions to his readers about what will become than anything else.
WORLD GONE BY picks up several years after the untimely death of Joe Coughlin's wife. He's still living in Ybor City with his son Tomas, half-retired from a life of crime and working as a consigliere for his old friend and local crime boss Dion Bartolo. Joe aslo mingles with the elite of the city as the powerful owner of Coughlin-Suarez sugar, bangs the mayor's wife and acts at the face of the family more than anything. When a female convict summons him to Raifort prison, telling him there's going to be a hit on him on Ash Wednesday, Joe knows better than to blow her off. Something's wrong. Joe doesn't have enemies anymore, so somebody is about to get greedy and step out of like to take a biggest part of the cake than they deserves and he'll have to work against the clock to find out who the traitor is.
So, what happened here? I wasn't too fond of he first volume of the Coughlin Series THE GIVEN DAY. I thought it had its moments, but that is suffered from serious pacing issues and that the narrative felt a little lost in all the historical perspective. I thought LIVE BY NIGHT was a nice, ambitious departure thought. Different era. Different protagonist. Tighter, exciting storyline. Lehane was writing the blueprint to a generational epic. WORLD GONE BY falls flat of these ambitions as it is more or less a companion piece to LIVE BY NIGHT. It picks up in the almost exact same setting than the previous volume left off, features the same exact protagonist, who' just not as committed to his life as he's once been. I do not understand how that choice was made, since there was such a leap between the first two books. Joe has a soon, I thought he was the obvious choice to be the protagonist of book 3.
There is an entire slew of issues in WORLD GONE BY that Dennis Lehane novels are usually free of: Lehane usually obsesses over themes. This obsession is an integral part of his characterization and that's what makes it so good. In WORLD GONE BY, it takes a while to show up. For the first half of the novel, I didn't recognize the writing of Dennis Lehane. I thought it was pretty nondescript gangster novel. A decent one nonetheless, but a novel that doesn't have a strong identity. When the characterization kicks in, it's only really Joe that's being developed and he sounds out of key, sulking about the moral implication of his life choices as everybody loves him and everybody seems to treat the ''game'' with the same respect than he does. Of course, there's a traitor in the family, but it's almost treated as an afterthought before WORLD GONE BY hits its last hundred pages.
Did WORLD GONE BY fell victim to the immense expectations I have every time I pick up a Dennis Lehane novel? I don't know. I like to believe I'm a pretty reasonable guy and that this novel was really unlike him. It felt stiff and predictable, and more than anything, it really felt like it wasn't Dennis Lehane's writing. I wouldn't say it didn't deliver, but to come back to my Michael Jordan metaphor, it felt like a 16 points, 4 rebounds and 39% shooting performance from the best player in the world. I didn't actively hate WORLD GONE BY, but I thought it didn't live up to Lehane's talents like LIVE BY NIGHT or most recently THE DROP did. On to the next one, like Jay Z would say, and quite frankly I could live with Dennis Lehane never writing a Coughlin novel again. There just flat out not what he does best.
There is an entire slew of issues in WORLD GONE BY that Dennis Lehane novels are usually free of: Lehane usually obsesses over themes. This obsession is an integral part of his characterization and that's what makes it so good. In WORLD GONE BY, it takes a while to show up. For the first half of the novel, I didn't recognize the writing of Dennis Lehane. I thought it was pretty nondescript gangster novel. A decent one nonetheless, but a novel that doesn't have a strong identity. When the characterization kicks in, it's only really Joe that's being developed and he sounds out of key, sulking about the moral implication of his life choices as everybody loves him and everybody seems to treat the ''game'' with the same respect than he does. Of course, there's a traitor in the family, but it's almost treated as an afterthought before WORLD GONE BY hits its last hundred pages.
Did WORLD GONE BY fell victim to the immense expectations I have every time I pick up a Dennis Lehane novel? I don't know. I like to believe I'm a pretty reasonable guy and that this novel was really unlike him. It felt stiff and predictable, and more than anything, it really felt like it wasn't Dennis Lehane's writing. I wouldn't say it didn't deliver, but to come back to my Michael Jordan metaphor, it felt like a 16 points, 4 rebounds and 39% shooting performance from the best player in the world. I didn't actively hate WORLD GONE BY, but I thought it didn't live up to Lehane's talents like LIVE BY NIGHT or most recently THE DROP did. On to the next one, like Jay Z would say, and quite frankly I could live with Dennis Lehane never writing a Coughlin novel again. There just flat out not what he does best.