As today marks the release of Scorsese’s Shutter Island, which is based on a book by Dennis Lehane, Trainjotting cracks open Lehane’s most recent novel, The Given Day.

TGD is set in 1918, and the Cubs are facing off against the Red Sox in the World Series. The Sox have a young hurler named Babe Ruth on the club; page one of the book shows Ruth hurling in a different manner.

Lehane writes:

They’d had to pour him onto the train in the first place. After the game, he’d gone to a house a few blocks east of Wabash where a man could find a game of cards, a steady supply of liquor, and a woman or two, and if Stuffy McInnis hadn’t known where to look for him, he would have missed the trip home.

As it was, he puked off the rear of the caboose as the train chugged out of Central Station at a little after eight in the evening and wound its way past the stockyards. The air was woolen with smoke and the stench of butchered cattle, and Ruth was damned if he could find a star in the black sky. He took a pull from his flask and rinsed the vomit from his mouth with a gargle of rye and spit it over the iron rail and watched the spangle of Chicago’s skyline rise before him as he slid away from it. As he often did when he left a place and his body was leaden with booze, he felt fat and orphaned.

I’m only a hundred pages in, but it’s a decent book. Lehane, also the author of Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River, tells parallel stories of a wealthy and well-connected Irish clan in Boston, and a poor young black couple making their way in Columbus and then Tulsa. Lehane uses very different tones and diction for the two parts; the grandiloquent Irish parts are a dramatic departure from Lehane’s more plainspoken prose in past works.

The boozin’ bambino is at it again a little later.

Babe went back into the train. He had a drink at the bar.

The train left Ohio and hurtled through Pennsylvania. Ruth sat by himself and drank and looked out at Pennsylvania in all its scrabbled hills and dust. He thought of his father who’d died two weeks ago in Baltimore during a fight with his second wife’s brother, Benjie Sipes. Babe’s father got two punches in and Sipes only got in one, but it was that one that counted because his father’s head hit the curb and he died at University Hospital a few hours later.

The papers made a big deal of it for a couple of days. They asked for his opinion, for his feelings. Babe said he was sorry the man was dead. It was a sad thing.

His father had dumped him in reform school when he was eight. Said he needed to learn some manners. Said he was tired of trying to teach him how to mind his mother and him. Said some time at Saint Mary’s would do him good. Said he had a saloon to run. He’d be back to pick him up when he learned to mind.

His mother died while he was in there.

It was a sad thing, he told the papers. A sad thing.

He kept waiting to feel something. He’d been waiting for two weeks.

Find previous TRAINJOTTING READERS…Steve Toltz…Pete Hammill…Tom Perrotta…here.