Paradise Alley: A Novel
by Kevin Baker

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Book Reviews of Paradise Alley: A Novel

Book Review: Magnificent epic evocation of New York in the 1860s
Summary: 5 Stars

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.

Summary of Paradise Alley: A Novel

At the height of the Civil War, what begins with strong words and a few broken bottles will, over the course of five days, escalate into the worst urban conflagration in American history. Hundreds of thousands of poor Irish immigrants smolder with resentment against a war and a president that have cost them so many of their young men. When word spreads throughout New York's immigrant wards that a military draft is about to be implemented -- a draft from which any rich man's son with $300 can buy an exemption -- trouble begins to spill into the streets.

Down in the waterfront slum of Paradise Alley, three women -- Deirdre Dolan O'Kane, Ruth Dove, and Maddy Boyle -- struggle with their private fears as they wait for the storm to descend on them. Deirdre, whose lace-curtain sensibilities have always kept her at arm's length from her neighbors, is devastated by the discovery that her husband, Tom, has been wounded at Gettysburg. In her desperation, Deirdre must turn for aid and comfort to Ruth, a woman she has always judged as morally depraved.

Ruth, too, has been cut off from her husband, Billy Dove, an ex-slave. At dawn he set out for the Colored Orphans' Asylum uptown, to collect his last wages. But he has not returned by day's end, or by the next morning. In the meantime, Ruth has learned that dozens of black men and women have been lynched or beaten by rioters.

She begins to fear the worst, not just for Billy, but for herself and their children, too -- because she now knows that he is coming. He is Dangerous Johnny Dolan, Deirdre's estranged brother, who after fourteen years' exile has returned to New York. Years before, it was Johnny who saved Ruth from the famine in Ireland, who arranged for her steerage passage from Dublin to New York -- and who beat her mercilessly until she arranged to have him sent away for murder.

Even as the riot builds toward its violent climax, Dolan searches relentlessly for Ruth and Deirdre, carried along by the unruly mob. In the end, these remarkable women have nothing but one another to rely on as they seek to protect their homes and families from the brutality of a city -- and a nation -- gone mad. Paradise Alley a story of race and hatred, of love and war, of risk and dauntless courage.

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