Just got done finishing it, was not spoiled by anyone and had not seen the film despite being a pretty massive fan of the director and some members of the cast.
Here's the good news: This novel is an absolute masterclass in terms of Lehane's handling of plot, characters, and dialogue. Not a second of it feels inconsistent, the characters are all involving, all have dark sides as well as good, and Lehane isn't afraid to make all his lead characters completely unsympathetic at certain points. The dialogue is gritty and realistic, with one or two exceptions. As a mystery, although I would put the novel into the 'drama' category first, "Mystic River" works brilliantly. For the first 200-odd pages I'm thinking, "oh come on! Either the ending is completely predictable or there's a huge twist coming". A hundred pages later there is a key revelation (not an Agatha Christie-type twist revelation, something that not only feels expected once you've read it, but fits perfectly with the plot), and a growing dread came over me... I predicted the ending, but only when Lehane clearly, as far as I'm concerned, wanted me to. I didn't predict who the killer(s) were, but I did guess the more important aspect of the ending.
Bad? Lehane knows how to handle characters, dialogue, and plot. I stated that above and his episodes for television masterclass "The Wire" prove this. I'm completely clueless as to why Lehane isn't adapting his own novels for the screen given that he seems more equipped to be a television and/or film writer than a novelist. His prose is... how shall I put this... not incompetent, more like hopelessly indulgent and silly at points. There are 'meat and potatoes' writers who go with the basics and focus on keeping their novel flowing well. When Lehane does this, mercifully for most of the novel, "Mystic River" is, and I'll say it outright, a near-masterpiece. What drags the novel down, keeps it from greatness, is the 50-odd (at least) pages littered through the novel of completely useless descriptive prose. Of course, I have nothing against novelists describing things in detail (some of my favorites feature little or no dialogue at all), but one has to be an artist and a master of the English language to make such things interesting. We even get some extraordinarily detailed characterization on characters whose participation in the novel in any important way plot-wise or thematically is, somehow, SHORTER than the time Lehane takes to tell us about the character.
Ultimately, the good definitely outweighs the bad, but I have a feeling that the film version of this, which I have yet to see, will be far superior to the novel simply by cutting Lehane's indulgent attempts at artistic prose. A great writer notes his limitations and works within them, and whether Lehane has improved on this in later novels I do not know as this is the first I have read from him, but "Mystic River" suffers quite a bit from Lehane being a little too ambitious at times. At 350 pages or so I might have considered "Mystic River" one of the best novels I had ever read. At 450 it falls significantly short of such extravagant praise, but remains a more than worthwhile read.
7.5/10
'Mystic River' by Dennis Lehane
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