How This Symbol Works: Billy Devine’s Birdhouses in Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

Few modern crime novels are better than Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River—maybe none. From the setting to the characters, the language to the pacing, it’s completely engrossing, a classic in the genre and beyond.

It celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary this year, and one of the things that makes it so enduring is Lehane’s subtle literary touch, which he uses to add depth and resonance without ever letting it hijack the story and bog down the pacing.

If you’re looking to bring some dimension to your genre fiction, you might linger over the birdhouses Billy Devine makes while angry at the world and resentful of his wife and son, Sean. In this article, we’ll figure out how such a quiet symbol manages to say so much, and we’ll finish with a few takeaways you can try out yourself.

Mystic River starts with Jimmy Marcus, Dave Boyle, and Sean as young boys roughhousing in the street when two creeps pull up in a car and show off a plice badge, kidnapping Dave and dealing him a life-altering trauma he never overcomes. Years later, Sean’s a legit cop, Jimmy’s an ex-con, and Dave’s a drunk. When someone kills Jimmy’s daughter, the three find themselves pulled back together in a web of grief, suspicion, and vengeance.

We get the birdhouses early, when Sean’s still young and his dad takes him to the cellar for a lecture about how reckless Jimmy can be. If Sean wants to stay friends, the boys will have to hang out near the Devine house from now on. A key bit goes like this:

Sean’s father, who often worked as a handyman around the neighborhood, came down here to build his birdhouses and the shelves he placed on the windows for his wife’s flowers. He’d planned the back porch here, something he and his friend threw up one blistering summer when Sean was five, and when he wanted peace and quiet, and sometimes when he was angry, Sean knew, angry at Sean or Sean’s mother or his job. The birdhouses—baby Tudors and colonials and Victorians and Swiss chalets—ended up stacked in a corner of the cellar, so many of them they’d have had to live in the Amazon to find enough birds who could get use out of them.

First, you might be wondering what makes the birdhouses a symbol and not just a flat detail, which is fair enough. Symbols have to stick out to attract our analysis, or how are we supposed to know what to analyze? We might as well start poring over every object in every book, which is actually cool if that’s what you want to do, but it’s not what most writers have in mind for their readers.

So what makes this one stick out? First, it’s pretty conspicuous in its specificity; just look at all those architectural details. Second, Billy pursues an excess that nudges his hobby into obsession: the birdhouses have no typical application because he always stops short of installing them, starting all over with another model instead. That’s pretty conspicuous too.

And on the heels of the passage above, we find out that Sean’s dad was a little unhinged when he was young, meaning he’s since been domesticated. Sean learned this in bits and pieces overheard from his aunts, realizing his once scrappy dad had “disappeared sometime before Sean was born to be replaced by this quiet, careful man with thick, nimble fingers who built too many birdhouses.”

In addition to the first couple tells, we get this showcase mention linking Billy’s development directly to houses, which are universal symbols of domesticity even in miniature. You get feral in the wild. You take your shoes off at home.

The second part comes when we think about what sort of house we’re looking at, which is a small one for birds. Moving on to consider birds, we interpret them as universal symbols of freedom, something Billy no longer enjoys due to his work and family.

Finally, we picture Billy rigging up heaps of architecturally elaborate birdhouses to lure in all these symbols of freedom flapping around in the wild, as if his subconscious wants to make a careful study of his untamed youth, which maybe he can taste again even from his current place of domestication.

But at the same time, he just piles his creations up in the corner of the cellar, almost like he knows he shouldn’t be making any kind of study at all, possibly because he thinks freedom is dangerous. After all, the neighbourhood’s rowdy men are always getting killed, hurting other people, or going to prison, so wasn’t he lucky to escape his long-ago liberty?

This notion is furthered when Dave is kidnapped not far from the Devine house, the boys now playing where Billy told them to. Even a little freedom, it seems, can be extremely dangerous. And indeed, when people in this book do what they want, the results are pretty scary.

You don’t need to linger over things like this to enjoy Mystic River, but they’re definitely there, and they’re definitely cool. Part of the reason the birdhouses work so well is that the symbols are already culturally defined. Houses mean domesticity. Birds mean freedom. Chuck ‘em together with some characterization and plotting, and you get this added dimension.

Compare that with a more literary treatment, like the colour blue in The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (which you can read about here). In this book, the author recodes the symbol, stripping away its traditional meaning and replacing it with something far darker and far more complicated. That recoding takes work, and we see the work play out on the page in ways that would probably interfere with what a novel like Mystic River is primarily interested in: its characters and events as well as the themes that drive them along.

In that distinction lies our instruction. If you want to add this kind of dimension to your genre writing, you can look for opportunities to take universal symbols, stud them with a few rhinestones, and insert them at strategic points in your plots and characterizations. You won’t get in the way of your story, but you will add depth for anyone who wants to stop and have a deeper think.