Kevin Baker is quickly altering the landscape of American historical fiction. His first novel, Dreamland, burst into flames three years ago — a hypnotic portrayal of Coney Island designed to parallel the chaotic city of New York in 1911. His latest, Paradise Alley, stays on Manhattan, but it moves back to the Civil War, rescuing from national amnesia the worst riot in US history.Baker's descriptions of New York City could be more pungent only with scratch 'n' sniff inserts. While Dreamland rose into the lurid surrealism of the carnival, for this more grounded history, Baker has only to follow the ghastly imagination of the rioters, whose deeds he unearthed in contemporary newspaper accounts. Indeed, this mammoth book threatens Cormac McCarthy's position as the country's most violent novelist.The enormous story burns for just three days, but it generates so much heat that I expected the pages to disintegrate into ash as I turned them. "Day One" opens on July 13, 1863. A new law has made all able-bodied white men "eligible to be drafted by lot into Mr. Lincoln's army, and shipped south to the war. There to be fed on wormy hardtack, and salt pork, and butchered by incompetent generals while their families try to subsist on begging and government relief." For the thousands of poor Irishmen who've recently escaped starvation, the suppression of Southern rebels seems a distant irrelevancy.What particularly galls them, though, is the law's provision that any man can buy his way out of military service for $300. The builders, craftsmen, butchers, street sweepers, gasmen, longshoremen, clerks, and unemployed drunks — that is, virtually all the able-bodied men who can't afford to buy substitutes — complain that Lincoln has placed a price on their heads considerably lower than the value of a single Southern slave.With a million people packed into the tail end of Manhattan, enduring sanitation closer to the first century than to our own, "all that's needed is a match," the narrator notes. Already suspicious in a Protestant country with strong anti-Catholic prejudices, the men collecting nervously in bars and on street corners have no reason to doubt the incendiary rumors from the front:"I hear the abolitionists is puttin' all the good Irish men in the front lines," one says."I hear they're bringin' a hundred thousand freed slaves to the City, to take their jobs."Those rumors aren't quelled by the fact that men who enlist voluntarily are shipped out in chains to keep them from escaping and returning to collect another signing bonus.Everyone feels the tension in the air, the static electricity ready to ignite social unrest in a city already charged by strikes and uncontrolled inflation. City government flees, sensing the impending explosion, leaving 2,300 policemen — almost all Irish — to deal with whatever trouble may come from their fellow Irishmen.Meanwhile, the city's 6,000 firemen, also Irish, serve on a collection of viciously competitive teams. (Sometimes, men from five or six different fire houses fight for hours over an available hydrant while the building they've come to save burns to the ground.)When the city's toxic fumes of resentment and fear finally ignite, it's a ghastly conflagration, captured here in all its consuming savagery. Baker's extraordinary talent � even beyond his capacity to uncover such a mountain of grisly detail — is his ability to organize this chaos and dramatize it in a way that's sensible to us. Amid this hellish encyclopedia of mob crimes, he manages to run the story through the lives of a small collection of characters spread throughout the city.Much of the storytelling falls to Herbert Willis Robinson, a blindingly self-righteous writer for the New York Tribune, who hopes to raise himself to the level of real literature by bearing witness to the city's immolation. That grand task, though, is interrupted by his concern during the riots for Maddy Boyle, a prostitute on Paradise Alley, whom he's engaged in a grotesque Pygmalion fantasy.Maddy lives alongside Ruth Dove, a white woman married to a black man who finds himself trapped at the other end of the city when rioters begin lynching anyone they can find. His efforts to wend his way home through this furnace of hate � while trying to hide more than 200 black children from his employer's orphanage — provide some of the novel's most harrowing and heroic scenes. His wife, meanwhile, remains holed up in her house, trying to protect their own children not only from the mob but from her ex-lover, Dangerous Johnny Dolan, an engine of unstoppable vengeance who's returned to New York after 14 years.These various voices and perspectives, so sensitively drawn, allow Baker to swing between cool history and pot-boiling melodrama. Despite its length and complexity, the story moves clearly from battle to battle, around the city but also around the world and through the pasts of these characters — including gut-wrenching scenes of the potato famine, the Civil War front, prison life, and back alleys of prostitution and crime. Baker is a master at charting the conflicting political, social, and religious currents as they course through the city. Everywhere in his vision of the mid-19th century lie the expressions of slavery � some far more subtle than the South's "peculiar institution," but all hideously degrading.The brave survival of New York on Sept. 11, 2001, places the chaos of this black week in particularly sharp contrast. Baker's breathless tragedy of the city in flames can't help but inspire a profound appreciation for the progress we've made in everything from plumbing to racism. But the little crevices of kindness and self-sacrifice he discovers amid this holocaust are a reminder of the best qualities in the human heart. Once again, he's lit a fire under American history and made it burn with a roar.
Hot with fervor over Kevin Baker’s Dreamland I moved on to Paradise Alley. Even though much of Dreamland revolves around Coney Island, Baker’s attention is never far from the Lower East Side. And it is on the lower east side that Paradise Alley is located, though we’re moved back in time thirty or forty years for this one--the 1863 New York riots in response to the Civil War draft. Paradise Alley is a small street populated by a mix of economic and racial folks. We’re concerned with three households: 1) Dierdre and Tom O’Kane, she an Irish immigrant (nee Dolan) who escaped the famine somehow, he a native of wastrel ways rescued from such by his devout wife. 2) Ruth Dove an Irish immigrant who did not escape the potato famine (“Year of Slaughter” is what Baker entitles the chapters set there). In fact the back story of her meeting her cruel and criminal “husband” (Dangerous Johnny Dolan, Dierdre’s brother) and wandering through the devastated countryside. has the feel of a science fiction post-apocalyptic novel. The brutal Dolan is later replaced at Ruth’s side by her true husband and father of her children, escaped slave Billy Dove. and 3) Maddy Boyle, a not-quite-all there prostitute kept in her house by her “gentleman,” Herbert Willis Robinson, a reporter for Horace Greeley’s Tribune and sometime “paperback writer” of lurid tracts and tales. O’Kane is in the army, recovering from a Gettysburg wound when the riots begin, leaving his family vulnerable to the marauders. Ruth and her mixed race children are natural targets, also left unprotected when husband Billy is trapped uptown as the violence begins. She is also threatened by the rumored return of her violent lover of yore, come back for revenge from an exile Ruth helped arrange. Maddy is naturally in the crosshairs of the faux-moralists of the neighborhood, but the moreso because she includes black men in her clientele. Thus, the riots become an excuse for the violent expression of hostilities that would otherwise be contained, and which have nothing to do the ostensible issue of the draft. Thus does Baker create a great lesson in how to draw the reader into the personal side of a political issue. Baker ranges far and wide in both geography and time in the nearly seven-hundred pages of Paradise Alley, and we are treated to almost separate novels on each of these characters. As in Dreamland, we see seemingly disparate stories eventually merge, and it’s a marvelous bit of tale-telling Baker creates as we turn page after page wondering when and how these characters will connect. Wonderful, too, is the depth of history. I knew a bit about all this before I started. Or thought so. As it turns out, I didn’t know anything much. I didn’t know the depth or intensity of the racism that lay behind the riots. I knew you could buy your way out of the draft for $300. I didn’t know that one of the mottos of the rioters was “Sell a white man for three hundred, a nigger (price of a slave) for a thousand.” I knew nothing about the intense competition among the early fire-fighting companies and how they formed the social, economic, and political core of the Irish community. I knew nothing about the literally underground communities that inhabited the NYC sewers. Probably, they still do. Remember Ellison’s Invisible Man? I knew nothing about Seneca Village, the small black community that was among the real estate entities torn down to make way for Central Park. I knew nothing about the exhibit of plaster dinosaurs that dominated much of the early park. And, as the commercial says, much much more. All of which Baker weaves into the story without the slightest feeling of textbook information dumping. What keeps me from giving Paradise Alley the ringing endorsement I accorded Dreamland is its bulk. Although much of the backstory is fascinating, much of it interrupts the flow of the immediate problem--those riots. Who will to escape the random ire of the mobs and who won’t and how? It’s only Baker’s extraordinary skill that keeps the present from getting completely swamped by the past. Furthermore, I have a disagreement about the ending. There’s a logic to it that my head wouldn’t argue with, but my heart is with characters other than those to whom Baker directs our last gaze. So, in the end, I put Paradise Alley on a high plane. But if you have to choose, go to Dreamland.
What do You think about Paradise Alley (2006)?
Paradise Alley by Kevin Baker recounts three days of terror in New York City during the 1863 draft riots that forced the government to recall Union troops from the Civil War to restore order. Three Irish immigrant women living in the filthy Fourth Ward recall their beginnings and their struggles. Under the cover of mayhem, they are targeted because of their relations with African Americans, the scapegoats of the anti-draft movement, and their men's voices are added to Bakers large cast of characters. Meticulously researched and vibrantly colorful, the story meanders somewhat due to the use of so many voices, but ultimately makes the book a richer experience.
—Judith
I ran across this book by accident, and I am very glad that I did. Kevin Baker does an amazing job of bringing historical fiction to life. This novel takes place during the Civil War draft riots in the 19th century, and examines the events from a variety of perspectives. There are numerous storylines which intertwine at different point, and there are numerous characters that are developed. My only criticism was that it was difficult to follow the many different characters at first, but after a few chapters I was thoroughly hooked. Baker followed this book with two other novel in his "City of Fire" trilogy, Dreamland (which looked at New York City around the turn of the 20th century) and Striver's Row (which detailed the beginnings of a young Malcom X in Harlem in the 1940's). They are all three great novels.
—Jody
Engrossing historical fiction focused on NYC during the mid-19th century. Main characters are poor Irish immigrants and freed/escaped slaves. The book tells their experiences during the Draft Riots. However, each character's past is told throughout the book, going back to Ireland during the potato famine, surviving in NYC, and fighting at Fredericksburg during the Civil War. Learned a lot about the period and how violent and destructive the Draft Riots were. What they don't teach us in American History classes!(less)
—Fran
