Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
February 13, 2005
How the Irish Paved Civilization By Joe Klein EMPIRE RISING By Thomas Kelly. 390 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.
NO writer owns New York -- not the way that William Kennedy owns Albany or Raymond Chandler once owned Los Angeles. The city is just too big. The best lay claim to a neighborhood, an ethnic group or a moment. Damon Runyon had Broadway in the 30's; Edith Wharton, high society in the Gilded Age; Henry Roth, the immigrant Lower East Side; Louis Auchincloss, the Upper East Side; more recently, Jonathan Lethem has captured a significant patch of Brooklyn. Now comes Thomas Kelly to stake his claim -- on a group, Irish immigrant construction workers, and on a transaction that is central to the political geography of the city: the kickback. ''Nothing,'' he writes, at the outset of his new novel, ''Empire Rising,'' ''gets built in Gotham without a kickback.''
Kelly is a former construction worker -- he worked his way through Fordham, that underappreciated Jesu-it launching pad in the Bronx -- and a former advance man for Mayor David Dinkins; his résumé positions him perfectly for his chosen turf. His claim is not quite literary. He is neither an elegant stylist nor a particularly close observer of the human condition. But there is a compelling muscularity to his work -- the plots barrel along, the characters are wildly colorful -- and there is a dead-on authenticity to the dialogue and the atmospherics. There is also a bracing, and rare, appreciation for the sheer satisfaction of honest work:
''Briody steadied his legs and back and torso and arms and clenched his jaw against the rattle of the pneumatic gun. His muscles were fluid one second with movement, static the next to drive the rivet home, a contracting and easing of his brawn that over the weeks had become as regular as breathing. The gang moved in perfect sync as four parts of one whole, advancing nonstop from beam to column to beam. The sun was out now, overhead and hot. The morning chill was gone. Sweat poured down their backs. Briody watched their rivet punk walk along a beam with a burlap bag full of bolts slung over his shoulder, his hat askance. He was 17 and glided along the six-inch-wide crossbeam with the assurance of the oblivious.''
The work in question is the grandest imaginable, the construction of the Empire State Building in 1930 -- a particularly resonant moment in the history of New York, the exclamation point that punctuated the Roaring Twenties. The stock market has recently crashed, but the depth of the economic abyss is not entirely apparent yet. The city is still blithely ignoring Prohibition, dancing the Charleston, drowning in bathtub gin. Gentleman Jimmy Walker is the mayor, nonchalantly adulterous, complaisant, casually corrupt. Franklin Roosevelt is governor, about to run for president, anxious to separate himself from the local political stench, and also from his predecessor -- Al Smith, a Roman Catholic and, arguably, Tammany Hall's finest flower, a great governor but a disaster as a presidential candidate in 1928. (Smith, for his part, detests Roosevelt.) Tammany itself is in decline, still suffering after the death of the brilliant ''silent'' boss Charles Murphy, and run now by an insurance man, John F. Curry, a shadowy nonpresence in ''Empire Rising.'' (Curry's absence is a distinct personal disappointment to me since my grandfather, also named Joe Klein, ran that boss's favored conduit for honest graft: the John F. Curry Insurance Agency.)
''Empire Rising'' is, then, a historical novel -- and there are perils that come with the territory, foremost of which is what an editor of mine once called the ''Oh, look, there's Walt Whitman'' problem. It takes a certain amount of grit -- Kelly would use a more graphic reference -- to mix and match historical and fictional characters. Even so talented an artist as E. L. Doctorow had only intermittent success with it in ''Ragtime.'' And Kelly has his hands full here, introducing not only Jimmy Walker, Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt, but also Babe Ruth, Lewis Hine and Primo Carnera. Judge Crater is a character. In fact, the mystery of the judge's disappearance is ''solved'' by Kelly, which also takes grit.
Some of the historical showboating is a diversion -- the celebrities, with the exception of the elegant Mayor Walker, don't have much life to them -- but Kelly has chosen a particular time and place, and the elected officials of that moment are, each in his way, crucial to the intricate choreography of corruption in old New York.
At the center of ''Empire Rising,'' though, is Johnny Farrell, a fictional aide to Mayor Walker. Farrell's job is to orchestrate the kickbacks. Early on, Kelly explains how it worked:
''The developers needed two changes in the building code to make the Empire State Building feasible, never mind profitable. Steel gauge and elevator speed. Two simple adjustments in the way skyscrapers were built that the mayor had vetoed twice without comment. Farrell had played the developers beautifully. . . . [He] had secured the mayor's signature, after doubling its price, of course, to a nice round one million dollars. And that was just the beginning. There were to be dozens of subcontractors on the job who would have to pay for the privilege, not to mention ancillary work like sewer lines, roads and a sparkling new subway station. Plus, someone had to meet the gambling and policy needs of several thousand workers. Farrell controlled all of it.''
Farrell is a second-generation Irish immigrant, college-educated but street-smart. He dresses flashy -- diamond stickpin, fancy watch -- drops $20 tips and flaunts an upper-class Protestant wife and kids. He wants to be loyal to his old boys from the neighborhood, but there is a city to run and new alliances beckon.
There is a lot to work with here, and I wish Kelly had given us a bit more of Farrell's inner life, the conflicts that cause him to be just a shade too weak to be a really effective bagman, a shade too decent to be a truly frightening villain. (Frankie Keefe, the corrupt Teamster boss in Kelly's previous novel, ''The Rackets,'' was a magnificently awful bad guy.) Indeed, the emotional heart of ''Empire Rising'' lies elsewhere, in the romance between Farrell's Irish immigrant mistress, Grace Masterson, and a construc-tion worker, Mike Briody, who spends his spare time running guns for the Irish Republican Army.
The word most often used, not always favorably, to describe this sort of novel is sprawling, but Kelly is a big-hearted and admirably ambitious writer. He wants to show the city top to bottom, from Jimmy Walker's boudoir to the Irish pubs in the South Bronx where the construction workers drink their paychecks. ''The Rackets'' had a similar scope -- it was about a Teamsters Union election in the 1990's (the mayor, unnamed in that case, was a deftly arrogant Giuliani sort). In both books, Kelly takes lots of chances, drawing his characters broadly, jamming the plots with coincidence, violence and melodrama. Not all of it works, but Kelly's city is palpably alive and passionate, and very recognizably New York -- especially in the vertiginous rush of upward mobility, the fissures it causes within families, the loyalties strained, the traditions lost.
Kelly knows in his bones the lesson that Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer posited in their classic of urban sociology, ''Beyond the Melting Pot'': this is a tribal town, and ethnicity trumps economic class as a social determinant. The tribes have their rituals, and Kelly knows his own too well to gild the lily: his Irish construction workers drink hard, curse with genius and swoon over their mothers. They are pigheaded, honor bound and always game for a good punch-up. His heroines are a construction worker's fantasy -- tall, gorgeous, tough-talking and with no illusions at all about Irish men. Those who belong to other tribes, especially the Italians, are incomprehensibly barbaric. (In both ''Empire Rising'' and ''The Rackets,'' there are Italian mobsters who terrify their Irish counterparts -- Irish violence, according to Kelly, is volcanic, emotional, a consequence of pride and stubbornness; Italian violence is dispassionate, surgical, corporate.)
And at the center of Thomas Kelly's New York, more vital than plot or characters, is politics. Not the politics of elections, personalities, reform or progress -- no, this is the politics of the never-ending transaction. Public employees' unions may supplant Tammany, bundled campaign contributions may replace envelopes filled with cash, and new ethnic groups provide the crooks and the muscle labor. But the buildings still go up, the contracts are still let out (and not always to the lowest bidder) and zoning variances remain an adventure. There are lawyers, insurance brokers, pension fund managers and mobsters crawling all over each other for a payday, and good government sorts (''goo-goos'' is the term of art) trying to thwart them. Kelly is too smart for idealism, too romantic for reflexive cynicism. He is a realist, who understands that there's just too much here -- too much money, glamour, power -- for the city to ever completely reform itself. The structures are too big to run without a little grease. ''Empire Rising'' is an ode to urban grease; I'll never look at that grand old building the same way again.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Permissions Privacy Policy
February 13, 2005
How the Irish Paved Civilization By Joe Klein EMPIRE RISING By Thomas Kelly. 390 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.
NO writer owns New York -- not the way that William Kennedy owns Albany or Raymond Chandler once owned Los Angeles. The city is just too big. The best lay claim to a neighborhood, an ethnic group or a moment. Damon Runyon had Broadway in the 30's; Edith Wharton, high society in the Gilded Age; Henry Roth, the immigrant Lower East Side; Louis Auchincloss, the Upper East Side; more recently, Jonathan Lethem has captured a significant patch of Brooklyn. Now comes Thomas Kelly to stake his claim -- on a group, Irish immigrant construction workers, and on a transaction that is central to the political geography of the city: the kickback. ''Nothing,'' he writes, at the outset of his new novel, ''Empire Rising,'' ''gets built in Gotham without a kickback.''
Kelly is a former construction worker -- he worked his way through Fordham, that underappreciated Jesu-it launching pad in the Bronx -- and a former advance man for Mayor David Dinkins; his résumé positions him perfectly for his chosen turf. His claim is not quite literary. He is neither an elegant stylist nor a particularly close observer of the human condition. But there is a compelling muscularity to his work -- the plots barrel along, the characters are wildly colorful -- and there is a dead-on authenticity to the dialogue and the atmospherics. There is also a bracing, and rare, appreciation for the sheer satisfaction of honest work:
''Briody steadied his legs and back and torso and arms and clenched his jaw against the rattle of the pneumatic gun. His muscles were fluid one second with movement, static the next to drive the rivet home, a contracting and easing of his brawn that over the weeks had become as regular as breathing. The gang moved in perfect sync as four parts of one whole, advancing nonstop from beam to column to beam. The sun was out now, overhead and hot. The morning chill was gone. Sweat poured down their backs. Briody watched their rivet punk walk along a beam with a burlap bag full of bolts slung over his shoulder, his hat askance. He was 17 and glided along the six-inch-wide crossbeam with the assurance of the oblivious.''
The work in question is the grandest imaginable, the construction of the Empire State Building in 1930 -- a particularly resonant moment in the history of New York, the exclamation point that punctuated the Roaring Twenties. The stock market has recently crashed, but the depth of the economic abyss is not entirely apparent yet. The city is still blithely ignoring Prohibition, dancing the Charleston, drowning in bathtub gin. Gentleman Jimmy Walker is the mayor, nonchalantly adulterous, complaisant, casually corrupt. Franklin Roosevelt is governor, about to run for president, anxious to separate himself from the local political stench, and also from his predecessor -- Al Smith, a Roman Catholic and, arguably, Tammany Hall's finest flower, a great governor but a disaster as a presidential candidate in 1928. (Smith, for his part, detests Roosevelt.) Tammany itself is in decline, still suffering after the death of the brilliant ''silent'' boss Charles Murphy, and run now by an insurance man, John F. Curry, a shadowy nonpresence in ''Empire Rising.'' (Curry's absence is a distinct personal disappointment to me since my grandfather, also named Joe Klein, ran that boss's favored conduit for honest graft: the John F. Curry Insurance Agency.)
''Empire Rising'' is, then, a historical novel -- and there are perils that come with the territory, foremost of which is what an editor of mine once called the ''Oh, look, there's Walt Whitman'' problem. It takes a certain amount of grit -- Kelly would use a more graphic reference -- to mix and match historical and fictional characters. Even so talented an artist as E. L. Doctorow had only intermittent success with it in ''Ragtime.'' And Kelly has his hands full here, introducing not only Jimmy Walker, Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt, but also Babe Ruth, Lewis Hine and Primo Carnera. Judge Crater is a character. In fact, the mystery of the judge's disappearance is ''solved'' by Kelly, which also takes grit.
Some of the historical showboating is a diversion -- the celebrities, with the exception of the elegant Mayor Walker, don't have much life to them -- but Kelly has chosen a particular time and place, and the elected officials of that moment are, each in his way, crucial to the intricate choreography of corruption in old New York.
At the center of ''Empire Rising,'' though, is Johnny Farrell, a fictional aide to Mayor Walker. Farrell's job is to orchestrate the kickbacks. Early on, Kelly explains how it worked:
''The developers needed two changes in the building code to make the Empire State Building feasible, never mind profitable. Steel gauge and elevator speed. Two simple adjustments in the way skyscrapers were built that the mayor had vetoed twice without comment. Farrell had played the developers beautifully. . . . [He] had secured the mayor's signature, after doubling its price, of course, to a nice round one million dollars. And that was just the beginning. There were to be dozens of subcontractors on the job who would have to pay for the privilege, not to mention ancillary work like sewer lines, roads and a sparkling new subway station. Plus, someone had to meet the gambling and policy needs of several thousand workers. Farrell controlled all of it.''
Farrell is a second-generation Irish immigrant, college-educated but street-smart. He dresses flashy -- diamond stickpin, fancy watch -- drops $20 tips and flaunts an upper-class Protestant wife and kids. He wants to be loyal to his old boys from the neighborhood, but there is a city to run and new alliances beckon.
There is a lot to work with here, and I wish Kelly had given us a bit more of Farrell's inner life, the conflicts that cause him to be just a shade too weak to be a really effective bagman, a shade too decent to be a truly frightening villain. (Frankie Keefe, the corrupt Teamster boss in Kelly's previous novel, ''The Rackets,'' was a magnificently awful bad guy.) Indeed, the emotional heart of ''Empire Rising'' lies elsewhere, in the romance between Farrell's Irish immigrant mistress, Grace Masterson, and a construc-tion worker, Mike Briody, who spends his spare time running guns for the Irish Republican Army.
The word most often used, not always favorably, to describe this sort of novel is sprawling, but Kelly is a big-hearted and admirably ambitious writer. He wants to show the city top to bottom, from Jimmy Walker's boudoir to the Irish pubs in the South Bronx where the construction workers drink their paychecks. ''The Rackets'' had a similar scope -- it was about a Teamsters Union election in the 1990's (the mayor, unnamed in that case, was a deftly arrogant Giuliani sort). In both books, Kelly takes lots of chances, drawing his characters broadly, jamming the plots with coincidence, violence and melodrama. Not all of it works, but Kelly's city is palpably alive and passionate, and very recognizably New York -- especially in the vertiginous rush of upward mobility, the fissures it causes within families, the loyalties strained, the traditions lost.
Kelly knows in his bones the lesson that Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer posited in their classic of urban sociology, ''Beyond the Melting Pot'': this is a tribal town, and ethnicity trumps economic class as a social determinant. The tribes have their rituals, and Kelly knows his own too well to gild the lily: his Irish construction workers drink hard, curse with genius and swoon over their mothers. They are pigheaded, honor bound and always game for a good punch-up. His heroines are a construction worker's fantasy -- tall, gorgeous, tough-talking and with no illusions at all about Irish men. Those who belong to other tribes, especially the Italians, are incomprehensibly barbaric. (In both ''Empire Rising'' and ''The Rackets,'' there are Italian mobsters who terrify their Irish counterparts -- Irish violence, according to Kelly, is volcanic, emotional, a consequence of pride and stubbornness; Italian violence is dispassionate, surgical, corporate.)
And at the center of Thomas Kelly's New York, more vital than plot or characters, is politics. Not the politics of elections, personalities, reform or progress -- no, this is the politics of the never-ending transaction. Public employees' unions may supplant Tammany, bundled campaign contributions may replace envelopes filled with cash, and new ethnic groups provide the crooks and the muscle labor. But the buildings still go up, the contracts are still let out (and not always to the lowest bidder) and zoning variances remain an adventure. There are lawyers, insurance brokers, pension fund managers and mobsters crawling all over each other for a payday, and good government sorts (''goo-goos'' is the term of art) trying to thwart them. Kelly is too smart for idealism, too romantic for reflexive cynicism. He is a realist, who understands that there's just too much here -- too much money, glamour, power -- for the city to ever completely reform itself. The structures are too big to run without a little grease. ''Empire Rising'' is an ode to urban grease; I'll never look at that grand old building the same way again.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Permissions Privacy Policy
