The figurative language of Dennis Lehane

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I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about metaphors from Dennis Lehane…..

American author Dennis Lehane has published more than a dozen novels and achieved fame not just as a novelist but as someone whose books are turned into movies.

Four have been adapted into films of the same names: Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River (2003), Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010), and Gone Baby Gone (2007) and Live by Night (2016), both directed by Ben Affleck.

His most recent book, the crime novel Small Mercies, is currently in development for Apple TV. I don’t normally have much tolerance for violence — and Mercies is terribly violent — but the story is so gripping and it’s so well written I was able to stick with it.

The novel takes place in Boston in the summer of 1974, and centers on Irish Mob conflicts, a missing teenaged white girl, and a Black man’s murder, in the days approaching the first day of school during the Boston busing crisis, when Boston Public Schools were under court control to desegregate through a system of busing students.

Lehane knows how to manage his plot, but he also has a sharp eye and ear for figurative language. Here are my favourite examples:

  • The power goes out sometime before dawn, and everyone at Commonwealth wakes to swelter. In the Fennessy apartment, the window fans have quit in mid-rotation and the fridge is pimpled with sweat.
  • Brian has eyes the color of Windex. They sparkle and glint at her with an air of mild presumption, like he knows the things she thinks she keeps hidden.
  • Every inch of her is soft and feminine and waiting on a broken heart the way miners wait on black lung — she just knows it’s coming.
  • Jules shrieks, “I call shower!” and bolts from her chair like she owes it money.
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