Book Review: The Gripping and Tragic Mystic River

Mystic River is probably the best fiction novel I've read this year. I have stopped reading police or crime novels for about two years now because I want to read to relax and not read about people getting butchered or getting into the sick minds of serial killers. My life is already too stressful and worrying about who's going to get killed next in the book I'm reading is not relaxing at all!
However, I made an exception for Mystic River because of its Oscar-winning pedigree. The movie came out a year after the book was released and thankfully, I haven't seen it. Vic saw it on HBO, and he was raving about it!
Now that I've read the book, maybe I can now watch the movie. But I don't know if the movie could ever capture the intensity or the uniqueness of each of the main characters. As I was reading it, I could not put it down! There was this feeling of dread that I knew would happen to some of the characters towards the end of the book.

But the Lehane draws you into their sordid lives and while ex-convicts and sexually abused boys may not be cool protagonists, the writer makes you feel for them and interested in them - finding out how they are coping with what life has thrown at them. As the book progresses, I really got this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that all this is going to end badly, very very badly.

And yes it does. There's so much tragedy in the book, but it doesn't leave you sad or angry. You know these are tough people and they are strong enough to receive punishment for whatever they have done and that whatever choices they have made in their lives, bad as their choices are, that they are always, always looking for that light at the end of the tunnel, telling them that it's all going to be fine after all.

Well, there is no physical river in the book. It's actually set in Boston, in a working class neighborhood which Lehane depicted so well, you could really visualize the place and the people living in it. Mystic River is some sort of coping mechanism that the characters have envisioned so that they can drown all their sorrows and pain into this vortex of a river, and appear normal and happy to people in the outside world. Sometimes, that's what we all aspire for - to just look normal and happy to everyone who knows us - so that they can never see the pain we feel or the different crises we are going through. We all have this vortex of a mystic river where we hide all that pain and sorrow - otherwise it would be hell on earth for most of us.