[Perrin is an American essayist, nonfiction writer, critic, and educator. In the following review of Banished Children of Eve, he praises the novel's "fascinating details about life in New York in 1863," but faults its "lurid" melodrama teeming with "too many characters involved in too many plots."]

Banished Children of Eve is a panoramic novel about New York as it was 140 years ago, during the Civil War. But people who know 19th-century New York from the novels of Henry James or Edith Wharton will not easily recognize the city. A different cast is here.

The book opens in Mike Manning's saloon, in lower Manhattan. A young Irish immigrant named Jimmy Dunne, who has just burgled the downtown branch of Brooks Brothers, is having an early-morning shot of whiskey. From there the scene shifts to the Astor House, where Stephen Foster is downing a morning beer. Now we jump to evening and to a minor theater where a young Irish immigrant named Jack Mulcahey is preparing to go on stage. He's a blackface minstrel.

Soon we're at the muddy site of St. Patrick's Cathedral, which is only half-built. Archbishop Hughes (an Irish immigrant, of course) and Father Corrigan are up on the scaffolding.

By no means all the characters are Irish. Numerous WASPs appear, just as in James and Wharton, but they are seen from a very different angle. Take Bedford, the stockbroker. He begins as a liar, goes on to be a thief, winds up a murderer. Gets away with it, too. When last seen, he has fled to California and has made a second fortune.

There's also Eleanor Van Schaik, scion of one of the oldest and grandest families in New York, and currently a whore. And Sarah Ward, of another fine old family, who copulates with Bedford in a closed coach, going up Fifth Avenue. In modern terms, it is their third date.

In short, there is not much Jamesian sensibility here. Not in the WASP characters, uniformly known to the Irish as rat-noses. Not in the Irish characters, uniformly known to the WASPs as Paddies. There is some in Eliza, the beautiful black actress who lives with Mulcahey. And perhaps in some of the minor black characters, too. They have gained it because they are even worse exploited by the rat-noses than the Paddies are.

Banished Children of Eve is genuinely panoramic. It's loaded with historical characters—not just Stephen Foster and Archbishop Hughes but also General Meagher, commander of the Irish Brigade of the Union Army; Jay Gould; and 80-year-old General Wool, who is still on active duty. It has all kinds of exciting stories to tell, culminating with the draft riots of 1863, far worse than any riots that have occurred in New York since. Many sections are a pleasure to read.

But it also has an astonishing number of faults. For one, there are too many characters involved in too many plots. I counted 100 speaking parts just in the first half. It's hard to remember them all, especially since there are also hundreds of non-speaking parts, such as those of nine generations of Eliza's ancestors.

For another, the author is a little free in assigning behavior to his historical characters. How can he know that Stephen Foster was impotent at the time of his marriage, let alone how his young wife responded? Is it fair to quote from an 1863 book by a philanthropic New Yorker named Charles Loring Brace in such a way as to make him seem an ugly racist, when Brace's aim in the book is to demonstrate that all humanity has a common ancestry, and not the multiple ancestry that many people at the time asserted in order to justify prejudice?

But the big fault is the melodrama. When Jimmy Dunne, who is an orphan, is taken out west along with many other Irish orphans, to be placed with settlers' families, the Protestant clergyman who leads the party proves to be a hypocritical bastard. Mrs. Ellingwood, the wife of the settler who takes Jimmy, seduces the 14-year-old boy at the first opportunity. He gets back to New York a few months later because a tornado sucks up both Ellingwoods. When Eliza, the beautiful black actress, does a stint in a whore-house (this is before she goes on stage), she gets the Prince of Wales as a customer.

If you like lurid, this is your book. If you don't, but are willing to overlook it for the sake of thousands of fascinating details about life in New York in 1863, it might also be your book. If you want plausible characters, I'm afraid it isn't.