Resumo de Paradise Alley

Paradise Alley chronicles the draft riots that shook New York City during the summer of 1863, at the height of the Civil War. It is a huge work, over 650 pages long, although one shouldn't shy away merely because of its bulk. Baker, whose previous works include the critically acclaimed Dreamland, serves up a no-holds-barred dissection of the three-day riot. It is a testament to his skill as a historical researcher and as a novelist that he can maintain the reader's interest for the whole darn story. Baker chooses to tell the story through many points of view, a wise move considering the complexity of the mob violence. The central characters are Billy and Ruth Dove, an interracial couple, hoping to avoid both the riots and Ruth's former lover, Dangerous Johnny Dolan. Johnny, one of the most evil characters I have ever encountered, had saved Ruth from the potato famine in Ireland, (also rendered in horrific detail) only to bring her to New York as some sort of wife/punching bag. We also get the story of Johnny's sister Deirdre and her soldier husband, Tom, along with the neighborhood prostitute Maddy Boyle. Baker wisely does not attempt to make each character a narrator a la Matthew Kneale's English Passengers, but instead weaves the meticulously researched stories into a far-reaching panorama. Baker cleverly throws a reporter, Herbert Willis Robinson, into the fray, which allows us to see all aspects of the riot. Through Robinson's jaded eye, Baker is able to include many anecdotes that wouldn't make sense in a more traditional narrative.
Having taught history for ten years, I can appreciate the burden Baker undertook in attempting to tell this multifaceted story. It is easy to look at the Civil War as a good v. evil campaign. The victorious and righteous Yankees used all its power to smite the slave-holding Confederacy and restored honor and glory to the Union. Reading Paradise Alley reminds us of how very wrong this approach is. Although Baker's sympathies lie with the North, he spares no mercy in showing most of the New Yorkers, and particularly the Irish, to be virulent and violent racists. As a runaway slave, Billy Dove pushes himself to freedom with the mantra free or not free. While in New York, he finds himself and other black people to be free and not free. Baker is a master at creating all kinds of tension, domestic, municipal, national, ethnic, political, racial, class, and I'm sure a lot of other types for which I have no label. Baker never allows his audience to become inured to the violence, never condescending into the banality of brutality, forcing us to acknowledge the rioters, the way they look, think, and even smell. The very epic nature of the book forces the reader to empathize with the main characters, although just as he refuses to paint the riot in terms of good and evil, likewise, he never lets any of the characters assume too saintly a mantle.

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