August 26, 2010: Page Turners 7 p.m.

Book: The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

Discusssion:

This month’s selection, The Given Day by Dennis Lehane, received a very positive response from the group. Of the ten members attending, nine gave the book a thumbs up, and one went sideways.

The main detractors of this novel were the frequent change in viewpoint and the choice language. The story was told alternately from Danny Coughlin, Luther Lawrence, and Babe Ruth’s points of view, and all of these sections sported colorful language, which, considering Danny and Babe’s occupations of policeman and ball player, was not completely surprising.

As usual, the group spent quite a bit of time discussing the book’s characters. In particular we discussed Babe Ruth. Many of us could have taken him or left him. He was not very likeable, but his situation with his baseball career provided an interesting correlation to Danny and the other police officers’ struggles. The description of Ruth’s salary prompted a discussion about the cost of seeing a baseball game. One group member remembered when it cost about ten dollars to take her children to a game and eat hot dogs. This in turn led to many comments on the rise in cost of many things these days, such as movie tickets.

We also talked about some of the members of the Coughlin family, specifically Nora, the housekeeper who marries Danny, and Joe, Danny’s youngest brother. With Nora, we mainly discussed her first marriage in Ireland, the arrival of her husband on the Coughlin family stoop, and her resulting bigamous marriage to Danny. One group member pointed out that it was common for immigrant men to remarry once in the United States, but fairly uncommon for a woman, such as Nora, to do so.

Despite her less than glamorous past, Nora was very good to Joe while she worked in the Coughlin household. The group unanimously expressed their horror concerning his father’s beating of Joe, particularly since it was punishment for saying a word Mr. Coughlin frequently used himself. We discussed how different each of the Coughlin brothers were, Danny and Joe perhaps being the most similar. We could never pin down Joe’s exact age though, which bothered us. Some of us thought he was quite young, maybe eight or ten, whereas others pictured him older, about twelve or fourteen.

In addition to the characters, we also discussed some historical themes in connection with the novel. The first of these themes was corruption in government, which is actually not exclusively historical. We talked about immigration in relation to corruption, the melting pot expression, and the idea of there always being an underdog in the U.S. population, such as the Irish and Italians in The Given Day.

We also discussed diseases, such as the Spanish Influenza outbreak detailed in the book, the Swine Flu, and the recent salmonella scare. One Page Turner did some research on the flu epidemic of 1918 and found that millions were attacked and approximately fifty million were killed by it.

We also mentioned the change in the perception of police officers from workers forced to buy their own uniforms and weapons while being paid an extremely low wage to essential public servants.

We ended the meeting by talking about some of Lehane’s other books, the movies based on them, and the reading list for next year. Flyers for upcoming programming and next month’s selection, Isaac’s Storm by Erik Larson, were also made available.