The praise has been effusive for Mystic River since it was published in February, 2001. The movie version came out on October 3, 2003, almost exactly 17 years ago. The movie was directed by Clint Eastwood and starred Kevin Bacon as Sean Devine, Sean Penn as Jimmy Markum, Tim Robbins as Dave Boyle, Laurence Fishburne as Detective Sergeant Whitey Powers.

Lehane draws a clear social line between Boston neighborhoods of what he calls The Point and The Flats. He paints scenes of family life of both comradely and combative relationships and sets the story up with Sean, Jimmy, and Dave playing on the street as boys when a strange event occurs that will bring the three of them  - Jimmy as a former felon, Sean as a police officer, and Dave as someone very deeply scarred by the opening event who never figures out how to fight off his internal image of the Boy who Escaped from Wolves. The story involves several mysteries that seem to be intertwined, and Lehane does a masterful job of disentangling and resolving them.

Lehane paints vivid descriptive pictures of his characters such as this description of Annabeth’s father, Theo Savage. He “entered the house, came down the hall with a case of beer on each shoulder. He was a huge man, a florid, jowly Kodiak of a human being with an odd dancer’s grace as he squeezed down the narrow hall with cases of beer on his boat-mast shoulders.”

Sean’s thinking as a cop with a cop’s intuition, “You felt it in your soul, no place else. You felt the truth there sometimes – beyond logic – and you were usually right if it was a type of truth that was the exact kind you didn’t want to face, weren’t sure you could. That’s what you tried to ignore, why you went to psychiatrists and spent too long in bars and numbed your brain in front of TV tubes – to hide from hard, ugly truths your soul recognized long before your mind caught up.”

Lehane takes liberties with the control of his POVs, shifting from the inside of one character’s head to another, but it works for the story and for the atmosphere he created. These people are in a world they’ll never escape from. The neighborhoods themselves as they are moving from long term communities to yuppy havens getting gentrified and raising rents – the neighborhoods become characters in the story, characters that will clearly outlast the occupants because they are changing and the occupants are not.

It makes a good story, one that leads the reader on. I found the ending a bit slow and I found myself wishing that Lehane would just wrap it up. I can see why it was made into a movie as the tale has a depth and complexity if you want to pursue it or filtered down to its key elements that would fit into 137 minutes.

I would rank Mystic River as a Keeper.

402 pages