Customer Reviews

Paradise Alley: A Novel

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

Kevin Baker, whose "Dreamland" made its strong and haunting appearance several years ago, follows up with another excitingly researched and characterized novel. Set during the five hot days of the New York City draft riots of 1863, "Paradise Alley" traces the lives of three women living on that street waiting for terror and anarchy to reach their doors.

Ruth, Dierdre, and Maddy are all Irish, struggling in a hard city that is nonetheless better than what they left. Dierdre and her family are the closest to achieving a form of middle class stability, yet she is the one who brings hell to her own door. Her former sister-in-law Ruth is a ragpicker. Now married to a runaway slave, Ruth came to New York with Dierdre's psychotic brother, whom they hear has been released from prison and is on his way back to town. Maddy, once the mistress of the journalist who tells part of the story, now opens her bedroom to all comers.

Baker fills "Paradise Alley" with rich details about the lives of mid-19th century Irish immigrants-their social clubs, their pride in their firefighting teams, the gangs, the church, and the backbreaking work. This is all wonderful stuff, especially his descriptions of the fire teams with their traditions and colorful names.

This is a nice big book, packed with compelling characters, intriguing historical detail, and plenty of suspense. Baker orchestrates his novel masterfully, keeping all the themes twisting and twining until the novel reaches its climax. This is one of the best evocations of Civil War-era New York I have read, and it joins Peter Quinn's "Banished Children of Eve" as an outstanding fictionalization of five terrible days in U.S. history.

Life was cheap in New York City in 1863, the setting for this powerfully realized, naturalistic novel. For $ a man who did not want to fight in the Civil War could hire another man to take his place, an option available only to the wealthy, the poor, of necessity, obeying the draft. Living in the city's fetid back alleys, where pigs ran wild, children sailed paper boats in rivers of blood running out of butcheries, and horses and dogs rotted where they fell, the mainly Irish poor finally reached their limits and exploded in murderous rage. During three of the hottest days in July, 1863, they rioted, bludgeoning any man, woman, or child who got in their way, saving their particular wrath for blacks, whom they blamed for the war--innocent neighbors who were stripped, set on fire, and hanged from lamp posts.

The "Draft Riots," the people who participated in them, the conditions which spawned them, and the politicians, churchmen, and police who either did not or could not stop them, are fully examined in this huge novel, filled with ugliness and offering little in the way of hope.

These days of anarchy, with all their depredations, are recreated through the stories and points of view of seven characters--Ruth Dove, who survived the Irish potato famine (depicted in horrifying background detail) and her husband Billy, a former slave; Dangerous Johnny Dolan, Ruth's abusive and jealous former lover; Johnny's sister, Deirdre Dolan O'Kane, and her husband Tom, who participates in the battles of Fredericksburg and Gettysburg; and newspaper hack, Herbert Willis Robinson, who follows the rioters around the city while worrying about his lover Maddy, a woman who became a prostitute when he refused to give her entree into his world.

Baker is a master of odd, and apparently accurate, details from the period, devoting many pages to wide-ranging background material, and developing his characters just enough to make the plot seem plausible, despite its remarkable coincidences, its frequent telegraphing of the action, and an ending which leaves no loose ends. The picture of humanity here is very dark, with details sometimes appearing to be inserted for their shock value. The mob's ghoulish delight in torture and mayhem is sustained for over 600 pages, an experience which makes the reader long for a moment or two of levity. I wish, among all the encyclopedic detail, Baker had offered a few hints about the inner resources which allow one or two characters to rise above the fray and achieve grandeur. Mary Whipple

This is an excellent book, which not only covers a little-known facet of 19th century history but has definite literary credentials.

In the summer of 1863, poor, mostly Irish, workers in New York resent the mounting Civil War casualties, and hate the recently instituted draft. When the government tries to impose the draft, riots erupt that affect the lives of a vivid cast of characters.

Baker writes in a literary but not pretentious style. This is Kantor-type historical fiction: following many characters and giving details of each person's past. Some readers will probably find this hard to get through; for me, it was effective, giving each character depth and ratcheting up the tension as I had to wait to find out what was happening to each person in the "now" plotline.

The portrayals of 1863 New York and Famine Ireland are definitely gritty, not to say grotesque, but one gets the feeling that vast and accurate research has been done. Baker's overall grip of battles and soldier mentality seems strong--Fredericksburg is excellent and the mob scenes are powerful--but the most interesting part is really the fire-fighting scene, with the details of the engines and the crews. He writes well about members of several ethnic minorities, presenting them as individuals and giving a vivid cultural picture without resorting to condescension or political correctness. The character of Billy Dove, escaped slave and shipwright, is especially well portrayed.

I am a native New Yorker. The 1863 Draft Riot was the worst event in the city's history before Sept. 11, 2001. Kevin Baker has written a riveting, painful piece of historic fiction that is well researched. For more about New York (then only Manhattan) slum life, read Jacob Riis How The Other Half Lives. Almost all of New York's inhabitants in 1863 lived between the Battery and about 14th Street. The city was crowded and sordid. As horrific as the violence was, you can see why the city's poor Irish finally exploded. In their eyes, they were being sent off to the war, to free people who would then take their jobs. In other words, to use modern corporatespeak, lose/lose. This does not excuse what happen, but explains the context. The author shows you how the violence was so bad, the police couldn't cope and regiments from Gettysburg had to be brought in to stop it. Also read Herbert Asbury's the Gangs of New York to get an idea of what it was like. It was the worst of times, and Kevin Baker showed us how and why.

Paradise Alley is set during the New York draft riots of July 1863. Well...sort of. As he did in the brilliant "Dreamland" Baker follows a host of fascinating characters telling their stories in full in the bargain. That means tracing characters back to what brought them to this moment in history whether it was the Irish potato famine, escaping North from slavery or joining the Union army.
This is a long book because Baker is so careful about fully developing each character's story. Among those inhabiting "Paradise Alley" are a journalist, prostitute, free black, and Union solider.
This is an unfliching look at life in New York in 1863 and the ghastly mob action of the draft riots, picking up where the film "Gangs of New York" left off. It is not for the faint hearted but IS for the intellectually curious.
In addition to the care he takes with this characters, Baker is careful with history. "Paradise Alley" is well-researched and provides a great history lesson as well as a througoughly fascinating read. With engaging characters coming together for a stirring climactic scene.
"Paradise Alley" does a brilliant job at looking how people react to extreme circumstances, the good the bad and the ugly. This book and Baker's "Dreamland" (set in New York in 1912) are highly recommened.

Although Kevin Baker's "Paradise Alley" and Herbert Asbury's "Gangs of New York" both focus on the same group of people during the same period in New York City's history, Baker's book, a work of fiction, has a much stronger ring of authenticity than does Asbury's, even though the latter was a newspaper writer and claimed to have based his book on interviews, court records and other primary sources.

Baker sets his story during the first three days of the New York Draft Riots, a week-long period of civil disorder rooted in multiple and complex causes including class differences (any draftee who could pay $300 could buy a substitute), economic hardship (the poor, who lived in squalid circumstances had little hope of improving themselves beyond a life of crime), ethnic rivalries (particularly those between the immigrant Irish and free black people), and lack of support for the war. Baker makes clear for the reader that freedom from slavery did not guarantee freedom from prejudice, even in the liberal North. Using a series of flashbacks (and flashbacks within flashbacks), and telling the story from multiple viewpoints, Baker illuminates the complexity of those issues that led to a week of rioting, lynching, and pillaging.

Beyond evoking the historical sights, sounds and scents of New York - particularly the tenements and Paradise Alley, which was in the vicinity of the notorious Five Points - Baker's book is a superb piece of fiction, well-crafted with sympathetic and multi-faceted characters. By using several viewpoints - including Ruth, the Irish immigrant, Billy Dove, her husband who is an escaped slave, Johnny Dolan, Ruth's former lover, Dierdre, his proud sister, and Herbert Robinson, a writer for the New York Tribune (and the only person who speaks in the first person) - Baker lets the reader revisit the same event several times, but seen through the eyes of a different person. The interwoven threads of the story strengthen the dramatic thrust as the various characters weave in and out of each other's lives, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not.

The most fascinating relationship, is that between Robinson and Dierdre, whose paths continually cross and whom we come to see as alter egos(much like Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith). Robinson now owns the house where Dierdre once worked as cook, and keeps a mistress (Maddy Boyle) in Paradise Alley where Dierdre now lives with her respectable husband in the cleanest, most well-furnished house. Dierdre picked her husband over all of her would-be suitors because she knew she could mold him into the man she wanted, but in the process, she chained him so tightly that he welcomes the war as a way to get away from her. Maddy, thinking that Robinson has chosen her because he can mold her into the woman he wants, tries to play the role, including a dangerously suggestive game they play, based upon a famous sculpture of the time - the White Captive. Ultimately, one relationship grows stronger, the other falls apart.

As the dust-jacket picture suggests, New Yorks volunteer fire companies appear often throughout the book, both at their most glorious and their most shameful. Baker is at his best and most original in describing the fire companies and fires, the rivalries among them (which often are more important that putting out a fire), their usefulness to the city bosses, their ethnic loyalty, their exclusiveness, and ultimately, their mob-mentality (and duplicity) during the Draft Riots.

In all probability, Baker did not set out to write the northern equivalent of "Gone With the Wind"; however, several episodes (notably a prolonged birth scene and poignant death scene for a character who bears more than passing resemblance to the long-suffering Melanie Hamilton Wilkes) and characters (especially Maddy Boyle who is Belle Watling's poor northern cousin and Dierdre whose resemblance to the proud and unbending Scarlett is much deeper than their shared Irish background) pay homage to Margaret Mitchell's Civil War classic.

In its epic sweep, "Paradise Alley" matches "GWTW" and would provide excellent material for a film. Alas, Martin Scorsese has just released "Gangs of New York," based loosely on Asbury's turgid prose, so it does not seem likely that "Paradise Alley" will reach the screen in the near future. All the more reason to read it.

Paradise Alley is a fascinating historical novel about a time and place that has become a footnote in most history books - the Draft Riots in New York City in 1863. Baker does a wonderful job in presenting this incident in all of its nuances and complexity. However, maybe to make it sell better, the novel concentrates too heavily (for my tastes) on the personal - the life stories of characters who experienced and suffered in the riots. The characters seemed very two-dimensional. Their suffering was so extreme that they lost their veracity and became cartoon characters.

Of great interest was the proposed walking tour of lower Manhattan included in the Appendix. I wish I was closer to New York so I could more closely experience and understand the events depicted in this historical novel.

"America was born in the streets," was the logo that adorned all the posters advertising Martin Scorcese's magisterial work, "Gangs of New York." Kevin Baker's book does not have the revisionist aspirations that film-it does not maintain that the draft riots were the place where a clannish America began its descent into the abyss-but it is more lucid, lurid and much more faithful to the history of nineteenth century New York City than Scorcese's film, great as it is, is capable of being. The city that Baker describes is as violent and brutal as any town in medieval Europe, and the behavior of the enraged, drunken, and rioting rabble makes the Klan and more modern gun thugs look like amateurs.

The backdrop of the novel is quite obviously civil war New York City. Some characters have escaped slavery in the South and proved unable to find work in the city, survived the potato blight in Ireland and passage to New York that ranks with the slaves' "middle passage" to the Americas in brutality. Other characters have become connected with the politics of the city, or have gone south to fight in the Union Army leaving loved ones behind to agonize over their fortunes on the battlefield. The way that the war split the city along class and ethnic lines-with Tammany ward heelers talking as revolutionary reds and leading well organized flying squadrons against all symbols of Republican rule in the city-is both enlightening and frightening.

The wonderfully drawn descriptions of violence done to all symbols of any type of power or property are frightening. Watching a strike force organized by the powers that be to end the draft degenerate into a group of wild savages is one the most interesting fictional portrayals of crowd behavior that I have come across in literature. The recklessly brave actions by the overwhelmingly outgunned New York police in defense law, order and human life is enough to inspire nostalgia from even the most violent critics of their more modern behavior towards people who are decidedly not criminals. Also well done are the descriptions of the behavior of the volunteer fire companies that were responsible for the protecting the city from disaster by flame-if you have ever wondered why New York has no volunteer fire companies you will not after this book. Frankly, with the behavior of those companies that Baker describes, the fact that the city never suffered a massive fire like the one that virtually annihilated Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century an absolute miracle.

As a beginning primer for the history of New York City, this novel is a nonpareil. The smell of dogs, pigs, filth, excrement, sweat, sex, industry, and gun powder coupled with a combination of violent passions inspired by race, class, civil war, and the ambitions of all the men and women struggling to define, and redefine the meaning of the word "American," makes for an incredibly combustible situation, and an absolutely wonderful novel, well worth the time it takes to read.

I bought a copy of Paradise Alley at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. This book was amazing, historical fiction at its finest. The descriptions of conditions during the Famine, on the ship to America, and the slums of NY were so vivid, I felt so much emotion for the characters. Very well done.

With the passage of the Conscription Law in 1863, the citizens of Manhattan are outraged, since most of them will never have the $300 necessary to buy freedom from service in the Union Army. Mostly Irish immigrants, their daily lives are barely less brutal than the years of hardship suffered during the Potato Famine in the land of their birth. Over a few short but violent days, these men stage a riot that is the largest incident of civil disobedience in United States history, exploding into a marauding mob venting its rage and frustration. Many in their path are killed, the majority hapless blacks made all too visible by their skin color, strung up and gutted, male or female, necessary grist for the giant maw of prejudice.

In an era dense with innovation and the complexities of human nature and ambition, these simple men are overwhelmed with the urgency to overcome their desperate circumstances. They yield to the swift justice of mob mentality. Yet their story is sprinkled throughout with the occasional brilliance of innocence in a hopeless world. Mired in the great conflict of mankind's struggle to survive in a fractured and unfair society, one riddled with injustice and depravity, these men daily watch the rich stride over the grasping hands of the destitute, deaf to their cries for help, oblivious to their need. This is a world where wealth and power drive the gears of poverty and the Yellow Brick Road is paved over with the dreams of immigrants and cast-offs.

In these short days of incidental violence, the words of one survivor, a prostitute named Maddy, are indicative of the random forces at work: "Men were always disappointed with something. That was the first thing to know about them. They were rarely satisfied, and when they weren't, they liked to blame it on something else- a rich man or woman. God in His infinite mercy... in truth it was all the same, the thing that stopped them. Best not to be mistaken for it." In unsparing prose, Baker tackles all the details, from the devastating famine in Ireland to the senseless torture of innocent blacks by fellow citizens. He portrays three couples to follow through this turmoil, an Irish couple, a mixed race couple and an unmarried couple, each with their own issues. To their lives he adds an unspeakable villain, who has survived life from one inhumanity to the next. It is a scathing story of depravity, frequently painful with detail and memorable for its potent message.