Quinn's Book

I should have been writing my senior thesis during the last 24 hours, but instead I was whipping through this novel. I really like mystical realism, and the idea of the author following the large cast of characters through the twists and turns of their eventful and intersecting lives. It reminded me of novels by Isabelle Allende which I really have enjoyed.

I admit to being biased (my family moved to Albany around the time this story is set and has stayed since) but still insist this is a great period story that is at times hilarious, at times heart-wrenching, and never dull. Although period literature is definitely in no short supply, Kennedy writes this book with a distinctly mystical flair that adds a stern dose of magic to a time most authors relegate to stuffiness and pomp. In addition, his characters here are immediately endearing, espescially Maud, Magdalena, and Daniel Quinn himself. I'm less coherent than normal having spent the night awake reading this great story in lieu of sleep, but for anyone interested in, well, good storytelling set with a historically accurate backdrop of Albany and canal-town New York as a whole, Quinn's Book recommends itself.

Fifteen-year-old Daniel Quinn doesn't know his life is about to change on a wintry day in 1849. An orphan, the result of a particularly bad cholera epidemic which wipes out his whole family, Daniel apprentices himself to the boatman, John the Brawn, as a helper in lieu of living in an orphanage. But when the boat containing the actress Magdelena Colon, her maid, and niece, Maud Fallon, is upset by a large block of ice, fate intervenes, causing Quinn's fortunes and fate to be interwoven with Magdelena, Maud, and John the Brawn. This was a wondeful novel, full of rich language, and subtle humor, which portrays the life of the Irish in the mid-nineteenth century with startling realism. Daniel's family seems to have arrived in America well before the parade of famine Irish, so starkly portrayed by Kennedy in all their squalor. While not attempting to stereotype the Irish immigrants, we see them as the white, upper-class citizens of New York did, a scourge and pestilence bringing filth and disease with them. At one point in the novel they are herded on railroad cars and transported away from Albany as undesirables, dumped on some less fortunate area of the state. Though the fate of the Irish immigrant is not the main theme in the novel, Quinn's background of being a penniless Irish orphan doesn't increase his chances of gaining the hand of Maud, though she declares her love for him upon their first meeting when she is but thirteen to his fifteen. Fate throws them together over the years, but it is not until he is a grown man that he finally seems worthy of the precocious Maud. Besides the obvious love story the historical perspective works well. We are treated to a look at the anti-Catholic Know Nothing Pary, the forerunners of the modern Republican Pary, Abolitionists, the Underground Railroad, and the New York City Draft Riots. A very enjoyable story.

I came late to William Kennedy's work and may have to take other reviewers at their word that this is not his best. But it's certainly pretty good, and I'll find out if the rest is better. He captures a kind of crazed picaresque worldview which is something like E.L. Doctorow on drugs. His disasters are gigantic, larger than life, and so are most of the characters. It's hard to tell if it's magical realism or just totally unlikely, but it's funny as hell and a tremendously fun and quick reading experience--in spite of the mass violence and misfortune and desperate poverty it describes.

An excellent book, just excellent. My cousin read me the first sentence and I was hooked. This novel made me think of Doctorow's Billy Bathgate and Helprin's Winter's Tale, and it's just as good as those masterpieces. Now, has anyone else wondered about the mysterious but obvious relationship between this book, Winter's Tale, and Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (e.g., there is a character named Daniel Quinn in New York Trilogy)? And what other references am I missing? What is going on here?