"Mesmerizing."
—The Washington Post
"Remarkable."
—The Wall Street Journal
"Intoxicating."
—Entertainment Weekly
"Magical."
—Houston Chronicle
"Compelling."
—USA Today
"A
sexy, dreamy romance." —Los Angeles Times Book Review
"An
engrossing odyssey as dazzling as the amusements on Coney Island.
A rich tale."
—The Hartford Courant
"Large,
knowing, teeming with ambitions and personality."
—GQ
"A
virtuoso performance. Dickensian in scope and intellectual breadth
[a] masterpiece."
—Esquire
"This
is literature and history at its best."
—The Christian Science Monitor
"Captivating,
a literary gem, polished on all facets."
—Denver Post
"An
epic recreation of an era. A boisterous, rollicking carnival."
—People
"Fascinating
and compelling."
—Iain
Pears, author of An Instance of the Fingerpost
"Dreamland
is an astonishment, an irresistible epic made up of equal parts
persuasive history and richly satisfying fantasy. With this remarkable
novel, Kevin Baker establishes himself as a master of the form."
—Geoffrey
C. Ward, author of The Civil War: An Illustrated History
UNABRIDGED
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BOOKLIST
BOSTON GLOBE
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
FEED, A magazine
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
LOS ANGELES TIMES
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
THE RICHMOND REVIEW
BOOK
The Magazine for the Reading Life
My
people swarmed in from around the country, and even the Continent;
from vaudeville houses, and ten-twenty-thirties, and circuses
and bawdy houses and Son-of-Ham shows. They came from the medical
schools, where they were trotted out every hour, on the hour,
as examples of perverted physiognomy...They came from working
their pickpocket scams or crawling among the gear wheels of gigantic
machinery or serving some particularly delicate inclination in
the most exclusive of brothels in short, from anyplace where a
fine hand was needed..."
Its
Trick the Dwarf talking, one of the cast of caricatures that electrify
Dreamland,Kevin Bakers carnival of a novel. Trick is recounting
the founding of The Little City, a freak haven for fantastic misfits
the Dwarf helps erect on Coney Island. It's a city within a city,
eccentric microcosm of the world Baker celebrates, turn-of-the-century
New York.
Chief
researcher for Harry Evans massive The American Centuryand
author of a baseball novel, Sometimes You See It Coming,Baker
here pens historical fiction of an intricate, epic, fabulous sort.
Trick is only the most patent of its curiosities. Wheeler dealer
Big Tim Sullivan, a kind of jocose, more venal proto-Tip ONeill,
gangster Gyp the Blood, rebel seamstress Esther Abramowitz and
her bad-boy beau, Kid Twist all the stars of Dreamland are out-sized,
mythic, extravagant. Hovering also, like strange gods at the periphery,
are Bakers semi-slapstick versions of Freud and Jung as gnomic
tourists discovering the New World (Freud shudders, Jung thrills).
Baker takes us on a tour of the times the Triangle Factory fire,
Tammany Halls labyrinthine politics, the pride and struggle of
the immigrant Jews and Irish, the rise of early feminism, of labor
unions, the monumental effort, through cunning, crime or heroism,
of our forebears to make it in one tough town.
Peppered
with Yiddish, period slang and snatches of period pop songs, driven
by pell-mell verbs and rendered cinematic with bold strokes of
hyper-vivid color, Bakers prose makes Dreamland riotous, a psychedelic
read. In so doing, he avoids the clunky expository taint of much
historical fiction. Among the effete, the genre has long drawn
sneers its critics damn it for romanticizing the past or find,
in its imaginative use of history, either too much ideology or
too little inventiveness. Colleen McCullough's marvelous and meticulously
researched novels of ancient Rome or Edward Rutherford's sagas
of London and Russia are among the many exemplars that quash such
quibbling: Indeed, because of its vast scope, historical fiction
can provide adventure that dwarfs those thin novels of contemporary
quiet crisis that more readily draw praise. Dreamlands
obvious antecedent, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime,another kaleidoscopic
take on 19th-century New York, also proves the power of the historical
novel. Taking his turn at the form, Baker proves more than up
to half the job: His handling of the history part of historical
fiction is masterful. He's not quite so deft at the fiction part.
By
turns a love story, a detective yarn, a witty postmodern commentary
on the texts the characters themselves read everything from Horatio
Alger tales to Marxist tracts and psychological treatises the
book sometimes gives way under the stress of the very ambition
that makes it impressive. The scrappy Esther, for instance, the
novels most sympathetic character and the one with the most interesting
story the tension between her growing radicalism and her ex-rabbi
fathers disappointment in the modern world after a while is subsumed
in the extravagance of the larger narrative. Too often, Bakers
people themselves function only as "gear wheels of gigantic machinery."
And
yet Dreamland still compels. Kevin Baker is terrific making
the past feel familiar: The loves and battles of these characters
seem very much our own and, more specifically, their psychological
and political concerns still dominate our turn of the century.
He's even better, however, at conveying the exotica of America
only a hundred years ago. He pulls the ace trick of the historical
novelist makes us nostalgic for a past we've never ourselves lived.
The energy, the raffish charm, the brutality, the sweetness of
Dreamlands New York makes the current Big Apple seem a
little small in comparison. A colossal entertainment, Dreamland
entrances. At its best when Baker renders history surreal the
book exactly embodies its title. And this dream is one from which
the reader only reluctantly awakes.
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BOOKLIST
January 1, 1999
James Klise
Before
movies came along, New Yorkers flocked to Dreamland at Coney Island,
where they could find every kind of marvel and amusement: freak
shows, gondola rides, miniature replicas of famous disasters,
even a hotel in the shape of a circus elephant. In this remarkable
novel, Baker meticulously re-creates the splendor and seediness
of turn-of-the-century New York-especially the street, where immigrants,
politicians, grifters, and prostitutes all desperately mingled,
playing their new roles. Like Doctorow's Ragtime,Baker's
novel uses some historical figures as characters, such as Freud
and Jung visiting on a lecture tour, but at its heart are Baker's
fictional characters looking for love: Trick the Dwarf, who thinks
he's found his queen; Esther, a sweatshop worker whose precious
free hours are torn between the struggle for workers' rights and
the thrill of her first lover; and Kid Twist, an expelled member
of the Jewish Mob who literally risks his neck for romance. Baker
clearly enjoys the tale-spinning, driving the story forward at
just the right pace, yet confidently pausing at times to revisit
key scenes from his characters' pasts; meanwhile, Freud and Jung
debate passionately about influences on the psyche. Baker was
the chief researcher of Harry Evans' The American Century
[BKL Ag 98], and the number of fascinating facts contained
in Dreamland is extraordinary. Baker-the-storyteller, however,
never forgets that his facts are only the footlights and props
for showcasing the emotions at center stage. Masterful and moving,
this novel can transform a reader's relationship with our history.
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BOSTON
GLOBE
Shaun O'Connell
East
side, west side, the fantasy of New York
At
the turn into this century, New York City was raucous and rapacious.
By 1900 some 3.5 million people, a third of them foreign-born,
lived in Greater New York. Each sought the American dream in a
tough city of sharp contrasts, from the "Millionaires' Row" of
the moneyed "400" along Fifth Avenue to the teeming tenements
of the new immigrants on the Lower East Side. Writers just before
and after 1900 strained to contain the city's extravagance and
indifference.
Some
composed redemptive tales. Horatio Alger's fiction about newsboys,
or "Street Arabs," reassured readers that pluck and luck would
lead to success. O. Henry's tricky stories about "The Four Million,"
as he named the city's common residents in a collection, showed
the city had a heart.
But
most serious writers portrayed New York as a killing ground. In
fiction and poetry, parables of disillusionment and death were
shaped by Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Hart
Crane, John Dos Passos, and many more. Henry James, returning
in 1904 to the city of his birth, was so appalled by the pushy
people, the soaring skyscrapers, and the garish hotels that he
waxed hyperbolic: "The city has the air and movement of hysteria."
Now Kevin Baker, in Dreamland,a high-spirited and knowing
saga of the city in the early years of this century, adds his
own fictional air and movement of hysteria to the lengthy record
of those who have sought to make language match the magnificence
and the misery of New York, "the city that never sleeps.''
More
nightmare than dreamscape, Dreamlandopens by assembling
many of its main characters at a rat pit. "They all filed down
into the basement; bummies and gangsters, shopkeepers and family
men; and a few drunken sports out on a tear." They are gathered
to bet on the time it would take a dog to kill 100 rats, released
into the pit 10 at a time. Not satisfied with this grisly roulette,
customers made side bets to see if Gyp the Blood, a low-life criminal,
could break the back of a randomly chosen human victim over his
knee-"right, left, and right again; three distinct cracks louder
than pistol shots reverberated through the room"-leaving him twitching
like a fish on the dirt floor.
Baker's
story kicks into high gear when Kid Twist, a crook with a heart
of gold, bashes Gyp's head with a rat collector's shovel, trying
to rescue a newsboy from paralysis. But Kid discovers he has instead
saved Trick, a dwarf dressed in boy's clothing. When Gyp and his
gang chase Kid and Trick, the novel is off and running, like one
of those early silent comedies filmed in the city.
They
hide in Dreamland, one of three Coney Island amusement parks that
feature freak shows, dwarfs, diving horses, hootchy-kootchy dancers,
murderers, and poets. Dreamland serves as Baker's central metaphor
for an exotic city, for an extravagant and surreal age. Trick
thinks, "How could you walk through the hissing, gleaming phantasmagoria
that were Dreamland and Luna Park, and Steeplechase; past all
the electrical wonders, and the exotic tribesmen; the death-defying
rides, and the tiny babies fighting for their lives in their incubators-and
not believe in anything at all?''
Through
Dreamland and into lower Manhattan pass a number of representative
men and women, fighting each other for their lives: Esther, a
rabbi's daughter who works in the Triangle, a sweatshop on the
Lower East Side; Big Tim Sullivan, a Tammany politician; various
colorful con men, freaks, dwarfs, strikers, prostitutes, pols,
and panders. Even Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung make cameo appearances.
(Freud, amazed, watches Charlie Chaplin cavort on film at the
New Amsterdam roof garden.) Dreamlandthe novel, like the
amusement park, attracts all kinds.
Like
so many New York tales that turn on juxtaposition, Dreamlandmixes
romance, crime, politics, and victimization, in alternating story
lines. Kid falls for Esther and Trick for Mad Carlotta, another
dwarf. Lovers, tailed by assassins, pursue each other through
darkened streets. Meanwhile, Big Tim and the other Tammany sachems
dine high off the hog at Delmonico's and feed on the citizens
they claim to represent. "Jobbers and the grafters; men with connections,
or an angle" make out, but "the other half" and more are squeezed
into tenements, work long hours, and die young.
The
novel that commences at a rat pit concludes at an infamous fire.
The Triangle sweatshop burned on March 25, 1911: 146 people were
killed in 15 minutes, most of them girls and young women working
for $2 a day, making shirtwaists. Thus farce climaxes as tragedy.
Kevin
Baker has written a baseball novel (Sometimes You See It Coming,1992),
and is working on a book about the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry. He
has also served as chief historical researcher on Harry Evans's
book The American Century.So I conclude he has a proper
sense of values and knows what he is talking about. Dreamlandis
clearly inspired by E. L. Doctorow's campy fictional treatment
of New York City history, Ragtime.Baker lacks Doctorow's
range of representation and quirky style, but Dreamlandis
at once instructive and great good fun to read. Baker is particularly
strong on period-piece details, like his description of Irish
saloons with starched white tablecloths, pickled eggs, and the
ubiquitous painting of Custer's Last Stand over the bar. He also
knows the street lingo: "how to run a stuss game, and the banco
scam, and the drop scam; and the mysterious art of how to render
a man senseless by tapping a cigar ash in his beer.''
Like
the amusement park it describes, this novel presents itself brightly
lit and promises great expectations. No doubt Baker knows that
grand old song, "Meet me tonight in Dreamland / Sweet dreamy Dreamland
/ There let my dream come true." Many readers of Dreamlandwill
enjoy singing along. I'm still humming a few bars, myself.
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CHRISTIAN
SCIENCE MONITOR
Ron Charles
In
dreamland, even America was possible.
Kevin
Baker's spectacular new novel is often more a nightmare than a
dream, but I didn't want to wake up.
Trick
the Dwarf, a Coney Island circus performer, opens the novel by
claiming, "I know a story," and does he ever. "It is a story about
a great city, and a little city, and a land of dreams. And always,
above all, it is a story about fire." Over the next 500 pages,
we descend into the controlled and uncontrolled flames of New
York in 1911. This isn't the city Edith Wharton described in her
novels. Baker has turned that luxurious portrayal of the Big Apple
on its stem. His New York is an explosive furnace in which gangsters,
prostitutes, politicians-all recent immigrants-vie for survival.
In
a seedy bar where the patrons bet on rat fights, Gyp the Blood
is showing off: He can break a man's back over his knees. When
Gyp reaches for a young boy, Kid Twist bravely-foolishly!-intervenes.
After beaning Gyp with a shovel, Kid and the boy are marked for
death and flee to Dreamland, an amusement park on Coney Island.
Here,
Kid Twist discovers that the boy he saved is actually Trick the
Dwarf, who disguises himself as a boy to snatch a few moments
of normalcy from his life of ridicule.
The
phantasmagoric amusement park provides a perfect metaphor for
the city itself. Staffed by the mentally or physically handicapped,
Dreamland is an ever-expanding complex of bone-crushing rides,
shocking freak shows, and reenactments of disasters.
As
Gyp the Blood seeks revenge on the man who beaned him with a shovel
and the "boy" who got away, we meet his indomitable sister Esther
and their cruel father, a rabbi so strict that his congregation
has abandoned him.
Trapped
in the crippling labor of the garment district, Esther is saved
from despair by her friendship with a young socialist. Together
they begin the almost hopeless task of organizing a women's union
and striking for better hours. But their modest requests are met
with horrifying brutality from the city's police and gangsters,
two groups distinguished only by uniform.
Above
the fray, but thoroughly in control of it, strides Big Tim, a
state senator and city crime boss who owns more bars, gambling
rings, and flop houses than he can count. Big Tim enjoys such
prosperity and power that he's beginning to dabble in a new luxury:
compassion for the people in his city. Why should so many children
be killed by thoughtless carriage drivers, he wonders. How many
women will be lost in factory fires because the bosses lock them
in?
These
questions are just starting to break through a lifetime of corruption,
but they're in harmony with the liberal reform movements driven
by shrill newspapers and the persistent lobbying of the city's
high society ladies. That the New York we know today could have
evolved from such social chaos should give us hope about modern-day
Russia.
Woven
throughout these stories of escape, revenge, survival, and reform
is a remarkable, often comic narrative of Sigmund Freud and Carl
Jung coming to America. It's the culmination of Freud's attempt
to legitimize his cause, but the founder of psychoanalysis finds
himself haunted by anxieties. New York's explosive energy and
sensuality overwhelm him. Abused and humiliated in a ghastly Coney
Island funhouse, Freud finally concludes, "America is a mistake."
Dreamlandis
a richer symphony of life than E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime(1975),
to which it's being compared. Baker, the chief historical researcher
for Harry Evans's recent American Century,has perfectly
captured the messy, complex, inefficient nature of social development.
Thick with the gritty details of unforgettable characters, this
is literature-and history-at its best.
©Copyright
1999 The Christian Science Publishing Society.
All rights reserved.
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FEED,
A
magazine
In
1911, the dreamland section of Coney Island was decimated in the
most spectacular fire of the last century. Neighboring Steeplechase
Park had burned in 1907, and although it was rebuilt-and Luna
Park continued to stand bright-the Dreamland conflagration signaled
the end of Coney's glory days. Symbolically, it prefigured the
close of the grand era that would disappear with the start of
the Great Depression, and for students of Coney's history it stands
as the first clear sign that the kind of lavish entertainment
that Coney was famous for would not last until the end of the
twentieth century.
While
Coney Island continued to be a popular amusement destination through
World War II, only a shadow of its former extravagance remains
today: The looming Wonder Wheel and the legendary Cyclone roller
coaster creak through their daily cycles amid a deteriorating
collection of smaller rides whose gaudy painted fronts are gradually
being replaced by cookie-cutter tilt-a-whirls and scramblers.
As the old, distinctive Coney Island fades further and further
into memory, a recent spate of books aim to resuscitate it, bringing
to life the showmanship that made Dreamland so unforgettable.
Carrie Brown's The Hatbox Baby (featuring a group of Coney regulars
transplanted for a season to the 1933 Chicago World's Fair) focuses
on the controversial display of premature babies as a freak show/edutainment
exhibit; Amram Ducovny's Coney, also set in the 1930s, looks at
the strained relationships of the Yiddish-speaking community,
the low-grade criminal element that made its home near the boardwalk,
and the off-duty freak show performers during the winter season;
and Kevin Baker's popular Dreamland, published in 1999, recreates
the ultra-decadent spectacle of the turn-of-the-century, in which
a fictionalized version of the notorious gangster Kid Twist hides
out with a dwarf who makes his living as the mayor of the legendary
Midget City (here renamed the Little City). It is this vanishing
world that Edo McCullough sought to capture in his 1957 book Good
Old Coney Island-a classic documentation of what has been "by
turns a slow-measured, sea-tossed, delightful wilderness; a raffish
and raucous boom-town; a popular hang-out for criminals; a fashionable
watering place for the rich and well-born; a gay and rollicking
playground for the well-to-do middle class; and a gaudy, tinselled
nickel empire for the masses." In his introduction to the 2000
reissue edition of the book, New York historian Brian J. Cudahy
writes that there is now serious talk of redeveloping Coney-and
perhaps the possibility of its renaissance is one reason we are
currently interested in revisiting the enormous spectacles of
those bygone days.
But
maybe our interest has something instead to do with the way this
kind of theme park entertainment has developed over the past half
century, with the advent of parks like Disney World and Universal
Studios, and with new, massively themed attractions opening in
Las Vegas every year. Today, our theme parks give us a happy world.
Human beings (if you don't count those dressed up as Cinderella
and Mickey Mouse) are not on exhibit-the creatures on our rides
are animatronic, and the performers are possessed of skills like
juggling or tap dancing. Our notion of spectacle has changed-not
just from the "real" sightseeing of the urban flaneur to the "hyperreal"
entertainments discussed by critics like Umberto Eco and Ada Louise
Huxtable, but also in the kind of fake worlds our amusement parks
present. Transgressive attractions-from the freak show to the
tunnel of love (designed for stolen kisses)-have been replaced
by wholesome "entertainment for the whole family," at least in
the world of immersive, American attractions like theme parks
and Vegas.
It
might be argued that our impulse for exploitative entertainment
has been relocated to tabloid newspapers-"Chicken Baby Born to
Woman of 65"-but then, that kind of sensational journalism has
been around in one form or another since the nineteenth century.
Perhaps we still indulge our interest in the bizarre by watching
reality television and reading Web sites full of outré porn and
animals transfigured into cyborgs with the help of computer-assisted
graphics; or, as some critics argue, by watching medical documentaries
that invite invasive, objectifying glimpses of unusual bodies
and cater to the same morbid curiosities that Coney once did.
But there is a big difference between looking at a film or photograph
and seeing a live show in the context of an enormous amusement
destination devoted to just this kind of entertainment. Web sites
lack the social sanction provided by a large corporate, moneymaking
sponsor (those of us who visit, say, amputee fetish sites are
hardly likely to divulge it publicly), and even with socially
acceptable talk shows, tabloids, and documentaries, the viewer
is not entirely immersed in the atmosphere the way he or she was
in the amusement destinations of the early twentieth century.
Seeing an image on a tiny, pixilated screen mediates its power;
at Coney, the exhibits were not only live, they were part of a
larger environment that perpetuated the same aesthetic.
True,
there are fringe entertainments like the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow
that hark back to those bygone days (when I saw Rose's show, it
featured an illustrated man who ate a wide variety of bugs; a
chainsaw juggler; a human blockhead; and a bare-breasted woman
who climbed a staircase of swords)-but these are neither "legitimate"
nor part of a larger whole; they exist only on the margins of
the entertainment spectrum. Though we still have the impulse for
the complicated, morally compromising experience of spectacles
laced with pity, horror, and empathy, there is nowhere today that
provides the same kind of thrills that once made a day at Coney
Island worth a year's savings.
What
we do have, in these recent novels at least, are some narrative
attempts to reproduce the Coney panorama. In all three books,
the characters spend a lot of time wandering around and taking
in the scenery. There are too many walking scenes to count. Near
the beginning of Coney, for example, teenage Harry follows a nefarious
dwarf named Woody along the wintry boardwalk, "Looming beyond,
the motionless Ferris Wheel anticipated summer lovers kissing
while the world turned upside down. Beneath it the Cyclone's sky-riding
wooden tracks formed a serpentine road to nowhere. Coney awaited
a warm wind to awaken it from its annual Ice Age." Harry wanders,
his friend Aba wanders, his father wanders, his friends from the
freak show wander, late at night when they won't draw attention
to themselves. The Hatbox Baby, too, begins with a prolonged panorama
of the fairgrounds through the eyes of a boy-the Transparent Man,
the Avenue of Flags, the Nudist Colony, the Slave Mart exotic
dancers, the man who swallows live snakes. And in Dreamland, a
viscous gangster named Gyp the Blood walks through the park in
search of his enemy: "past the Barrel of Fun, and the Razzle Dazzle.
Past the Venetian Gondolas and the Golden Stairs and the Chanticleer,
past the Barrel of Love and the Human Roulette and the Cave of
Winds and Human Pool Table and the Down and Out."
Baker's
point is complicated. First, he connects the exploitation of the
labor force with the exploitation of the Coney freaks and prostitutes
who populate his novel. But not only does he implicitly compare
the workers to the freak show performers, and point out that people
who were exploited by their working conditions spent their weekends
exploiting other people by gawking at them, he also links the
freedoms of Coney to the freedoms of which immigrants and factory
drones dreamed. On the boat to America, the first glimpse of the
new world Kid Twist gets is Dreamland, ablaze in light.
Historically,
Coney Island was a place for working-class people to escape the
social strictures by which they were otherwise bound-not only
the crippling conditions of life in the factories, but also moral
constrictions. Esther, Baker's heroine, steals erotic moments
with Kid riding various amusement rides, and relations between
men and women were relaxed and sexually charged in Coney's permissive
atmosphere-at Steeplechase, in particular. In Cheap Amusements:
Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, Kathy
Peiss notes that Dreamland itself advocated a middle-class morality
that opposed the tawdry dance halls of the 1800s, but that Luna
Park promoted romance on rides like the Old Mill and the Canals
of Venice, and that Steeplechase-full of funhouses, sideshow attractions,
and ingenious mechanical wonders-"encouraged familiarity between
strangers, permitted a free-and-easy sexuality.... Within the
amusement park, familiarity between women and men could be acceptable
if tightly structured and made harmless through laughter."
Coney
was a place of contradictions-where wonder mixed with disgust,
and pleasure with guilt. Almost biblical in its proportions, the
Dreamland fire signified an end not only to this kind of debauched
spectacle, but almost to the idea of it-as though our interest
could be cleansed away by flames. These days, despite our tabloid
papers, our medical documentaries, and our afternoon talk shows
exploiting the problems of people with skin diseases, multiple
personality disorders, and sextuplet births, we think we know
better than to be entertained by such things. Our amusement parks
and Las Vegas hotels are all but guilt-free, and yet they don't
provide the kind of horrific, emotional, and, yes, dirty thrill
that the shows of Coney Island once did. And that is what we miss.
Copyright
©2000 FEED Inc. All rights reserved.
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HOUSTON
CHRONICLE
Cecile S. Holmes
Immigrants
in Dreamland
Picture
Coney Island, land of hot dogs, Ferris wheels and games of chance.
American mecca for the bored. Then turn back the clock almost
100 years to the early part of this century.
Imagine
yourself an exhausted immigrant. You've taken a long, lonely voyage,
leaving behind a familiar homeland, family members, the only world
you've ever known. Your first glimpse of this promised land of
America is Coney Island's glittering amusement parks. You see
a world awash in lights that burn even brighter because of your
hopeful dreams.
This
is part of the backdrop for Kevin Baker's sometimes searing and
sometimes magical chronicle of life in turn-of-the century America.
With
a master researcher's eye for detail and historical accuracy,
Baker lures you into a world of gangsters, industrial giants,
small-time entrepreneurs and political machines. He unveils a
New York often ruled by corruption, with crooked cops, bribery
and street gangs.
Baker
helps the reader imagine what it was like for immigrants in the
days before political correctness and ethnic sensitivity. In the
cities near Dreamland—indeed in Dreamland itself—ethnic
and cultural realities clash in the confusing mix of Russian Jews,
Irish Catholics and other groups that flow in and out of Baker's
story. The principals are Kid Twist, a Jew from Eastern Europe
who arrives on American shores as a stowaway; Esther, a humble
seamstress and rabbi's daughter who grows into a union organizer
and an ardent advocate of women's rights; and her estranged brother
Gyp the Blood, a rough and ruthless Lower East Side hood.
Day-to-day
life is a struggle lived out in squalid apartments. Always beneath
the surface of Baker's narrative is fear. Esther, whose angry
father speaks about her as if she were in another room, is like
two people: a hard-working factory employee by day and still a
young girl with dreams by night.
The
supporting cast is as interesting — and sometimes as deluded
or dysfunctional-as players in today's top-drawing soap operas.
Entering the world of carnival life, you meet people like Trick
the Dwarf, a self-styled philosopher, and Mad Carlotta, the dwarf
who believes she's empress of Mexico.
On
the ocean liner that carries one central character as a stowaway,
the paying guests include psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl
Jung. Coming to the United States for a lecture tour, they are
already at odds over their different approaches to the human psyche.
The novel's emotion-laden narrative is driven by the stories of
the three principal characters. But like the circus, Dreamlandalways
has something going on at another level. In fact, at times the
novel's subplots are so complex that the reader gets lost. It
is tempting to dismiss them as too complicated to follow.
But
Baker's prose flows so effortlessly most of the time that the
reader winds back into the main story after meandering down a
tributary.
Cecile
S. Holmes is religion editor of the Chronicle.
Copyright © 2000 The Houston Chronicle
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LOS
ANGELES TIMES
THE LOWER DEPTHS by Naomi
Glauberman
Naomi Glauberman is an essayist and short story writer
Kevin
Baker loves playing with history. In his first novel, Sometimes
You See It Coming(1993), he compressed a century of baseball
lore into the story of one mysterious player on the New York Mets.
His second, more ambitious novel, Dreamland,is named for
a real, if unbelievable, place—one of the three great Coney
Island amusement parks that drew crowds, accolades and cries of
alarm at the turn of the century.
From
ever-shifting points of view and perspectives, the book follows
a slew of historical and fictional figures as they move between
the wonders and weirdness of Coney Island and the squalid streets,
bars, tenements, opium dens and sweatshops of Manhattan's Lower
East Side. Baker crams every page with impressions, textures,
sights, sounds and memories. Peddlers, tailors, factory girls
and rabbis cross paths with Jewish gangsters, whores, brutal cops,
corrupt politicians, socialist dreamers, side-show performers
and an extraordinary roster of animals—rats, horses, elephants,
monkeys, chickens and even a porcupine.
Improbably
enough, Sigmund Freud and his gang of psychoanalysts also wander
through the book. Improbable, but accurate—Freud and his
cohorts toured New York City, including Coney Island, in 1909,
and Baker's portrait of a Freud immersed in his anxieties about
his upcoming lectures at Clark University; his deteriorating relationship
with his protege, Carl Jung; and his distaste for the excesses
of American life are all based in fact.
Other
historical figures that populate this novel include Clara Lemlich,
a fiery union activist; Frances Perkins, the social worker and
reformer; Thomas Edison, presiding at the electrocution of an
elephant; and Emma Goldman, the famous anarchist, who wildly applauds
Freud's lectures. In Baker's book, the foremen at the Triangle
Shirtwaist Factory are named Podhoretz and Kristol, in inverse
homage to those modern-day neoconservatives.
The
blending of fact and fiction in New York City during those wild
years instantly evokes E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime,but though
Doctorow danced across the surface of the period, giving us only
glimpses of the chaos below, Baker's Dreamlandplunges enthusiastically
into the depths. This is no sanitized saga of crowded streets
and teeming masses. Death, destruction and decay are never far
from the center: Street urchins go hungry and unclothed, boys
raising pigeons on rooftops are transformed into sadistic gang
rapists and sharply dressed young gangsters poison horses and
kill each other with no regrets.
A
neat plot summation would only be deceptive (and perhaps impossible).
Snaking through the book is a convoluted but historically documented
account of revenge and retribution: the sad tale of a gambler,
Herman "Beansy" Rosenthal, who talked too much, and of the gangsters
and politicians who schemed to do him in.
As
these plots wind toward their inevitable denouement, Baker's characters
have plenty of time for observation and reflection, which provide
the book's most resonant moments. The rueful ruminations of Big
Tim Sullivan, the Tammany Hall politician and entrepreneur; Sadie
Mendelsohn's memories of her grim life of prostitution; the retelling
of Kid Twist's journey from Eastern European shtetl to Monk Eastman's
gang; and the incredible tales of Coney Island, set forth by Trick
the Dwarf, present pictures that are both lyrical and harsh.
Scenes
verging on nostalgia or sentimentality are swiftly undercut by
a violent reality. Listen to Trick the Dwarf describing a late-night
Coney Island scene: "The whores were still up, washing themselves
in their room basins. We could hear them calling, each to each,
as we climbed the winding, spiral staircase; lovely bright voices,
twittering like songbirds; happy to be at the end of the night.
Though it was this hour, too, that they tended to kill themselves."
Most
developed is the story of Esther Abramowitz, a factory worker
whom we follow from lint-filled sweatshops through cafes and union
halls to picket lines and jail. Amid all this grime and drudgery,
there are lovely and surprising moments, as when Esther remembers
the idyllic summer when the shops were closed and she camped with
a group of factory girls in the open air of the New Jersey Palisades:
"After a few weeks, their clothes began to turn ragged around
the edges. They grew thinner, and browner, and began to take on
the look of the hills around them. They went bathing naked in
an abandoned quarry, and climbed the sheerest cliffs, and Esther
learned to identify birds, and to play poker; to set up a tent
and chop wood and start fire—all of the great, frivolous
things she would never need to know again. They spent whole blissful
hours, too, reading out in the sunlight, all their Dickens, and
Hardy, and George Eliot. Shakespeare and their Byron and Keats
and Alfred Lord Tennyson. They were more impatient with Madame
Bovary and Anna Karenina, they didn't understand why such women
didn't use their considerable free time to better their minds—though
Esther was moved by the hot tears they shed." At the emotional
center of the book is a love story—a sexy, dreamy romance
between Esther and Kid Twist, a gangster in hiding. Each Sunday
they stroll on the beach or boardwalk, dance, go on every ride,
gawk at the exhibits, including incubator babies or acrobats leaping
from a tenement fire, eat at the restaurants and make love in
an elephant-shaped hotel. Their romance takes them by surprise.
It's sexy exactly because it is inexplicable.
Befitting
a novel in which Freud and Jung roam, each of Dreamland's
characters is consumed by regret and anxiety. Haunted by the voices
of their fathers, plagued by their memories, doubting their courage
or their wisdom, they are all pushing toward a realization of
an American dream. In an afterword, Baker, who was the chief historical
researcher for Harold Evans' The American Century,provides
a long list of his sources and inspirations, including period
fiction, standard histories, Luc Sante's nonfiction work "Low
Life" and Ric Burns' documentary "Coney Island." Baker is obviously
not the first to visit this territory, but his triumph is in meshing
his fictional creations and a dense historical landscape. The
novel's many plots, subplots and digressions intersect and interlock
like pieces of an immense three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. If
all this sounds daunting, overwhelming or an assault to the senses,
it isn't. To help the reader wend a way through this polyglot
universe, Baker appends a detailed list of characters and an extensive
glossary of Yiddish words and Irish and Bowery slang. Although
the interconnections and intersections threaten to overwhelm the
emotional power of this book, the characters, amazingly enough,
remain real. Their voices, dreams and emotions ring true; their
stories, invented or not, consistently surprise and engage. Dreamland's
power comes from its breadth, its unexpected juxtapositions and
the joyful accretion of one bizarre tale after another. In this
harsh but vibrant view of a time not that long ago, it's not always
clear which dreams have been fulfilled and which promises broken.
©
Copyright The Los Angeles Times
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THE
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Thomas Mallon
Time
and Again This novel of turn-of-the-century New York covers Coney
Island, gangsters and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.
Kevin
Baker's jampacked novel of New York City circa 1910 rushes between
lower Manhattan and Coney Island like a wild amusement-park ride
on a continuous loop. The author shanghais all sorts of real-life
Tammany pols, Bowery gangsters, factory girls and carnival attractions
to join his own inventions inside a book that teems with violence,
humor, information and hustle. Dreamlandis historical fiction
at its most entertaining and, in a number of spots, most high-handed.
The
novel's whirligig of plots more or less all proceed from an incident
that follows a heavily bet dog-and-rat fight in a basement off
Baxter Street. Kid Twist incurs the lasting enmity of his fellow
gangster Gyp the Blood when he hits Gyp with a shovel in order
to save a newsboy (or so he thinks) from having his back broken
across Gyp's knee. Now on the run from "the most dangerous lunatic
in New York," Kid soon makes matters much worse by romancing a
girl he doesn't know is Gyp's sister Esther.
The
little fellow Kid has saved is actually Trick the Dwarf, a performer
at Coney Island's newest and most magical park, Dreamland. Trick
sometimes likes to pass for a newsboy, since "with a little makeup,
I could not only hide my misshapen body, I could be young again.
And what, after all, is the greater deformity-size or age?" In
gratitude for his rescue from Gyp, Trick hides Kid Twist at Coney
Island's Tin Elephant Hotel, where eventually Esther joins him.
Trick himself is in love with the tiny, enchantingly mad Carlotta,
whom he contrives to make queen of a built-to-scale Little City,
the novel's version of Lilliput, a community of 300 midgets that
actually existed in Dreamland.
Trying to overcome the same tenement life her brother escaped
through crime, Esther first toils in a sweatshop, stitching sleeve
linings for coats, and later takes a job at the Triangle Shirtwaist
factory. With the encouragement of Clara Lemlich-the bravest kochleffl
(rabble-rouser) of all the young working women and a real-life
activist who can be found in histories of the great Triangle fire-Esther
is transformed from wage slave to agitator.
Lumbering
between the worlds of labor and crime and amusement is Big Tim
Sullivan, the sentimental political boss and investor in Coney
Island. A builder of the crude ethnic bridges that would create
the city's modern body politic (''Big Tim's specialty had always
been Jews''), Sullivan pushed through labor reforms and the famous
law against concealed weapons that bears his name even as he stole
elections and—as Baker has it—stood behind the famous
murder of the gambler Herman Rosenthal, for which the police lieutenant
Charles Becker was eventually executed.
Dreamlandis
terrific fun, though ultimately something less than the sum of
its gaudy episodes. Its gangland and labor narratives tend to
move in more predictable increments than the action out at Coney
Island; Trick, the only character whose tale gets told in the
first person, becomes the most real and affecting one in the novel.
The book's best lines belong to him: "Ours was the most credulous
of ages, for everything came true." Baker manages to throw everything
together for a fiery dual climax—Dreamland and the Triangle
factory both burned in 1911—but the 500-page ride to it provides
a lot of bumps along with the thrills. Baker works his italicized
refrains rather hard and occasionally seems to be blocking the
movie instead of writing the book. Frequent interruptions to follow
Freud and Jung on their roughly contemporaneous American travels
add nothing.
Baker
is also the author of Sometimes You See It Coming(1993),
a delightful baseball novel with some of the same vividness and
ramshackle construction displayed by Dreamland.He has more
recently worked as Harold Evans's chief researcher on The American
Century,an experience that no doubt helped him stuff his new
book with all its song and food and spectacles.
In
a concluding note on his sources, Baker offers a modest manifesto
for historical fiction, saying its essential obligations are to
"a good story," "human nature" and "an essential core of truth"—which
is to say, the forest of plausibility instead of every factual
tree. He confesses to a number of chronological manipulations—allowing,
for instance, George McClellan, "son of the famous Civil War flop
by the same name," to preside as Mayor over the book's action,
even though McClellan had left office before the novel's principal
events occurred. Baker hopes that readers will "amuse themselves
sniffing out the real, unnamed, historical personages" he has
put into the narrative. Some readers may, but their amusement
can only make them conscious of the author and his method; it
will hardly keep their disbelief suspended.
All
historical fiction requires manipulation and outright lying, but
rearrangement of the public record on the scale conducted by Baker
really makes for an allied genre one might call "historical fantasy,"
a worthy but more perilous endeavor. Readers who don't know the
history end up misinformed; those who do know it may end up irritated
or perplexed. Baker provides so much pleasure here that one hates
to complain, but he might be better off with a clearer set of
rules for himself. Naming a composite of "the great Coney Island
entrepreneurs" after his brother-in-law (Matthew Brinckerhoff,
acknowledged in the notes) is a charming self-indulgence, on the
order of the inconspicuous self-image a cathedral sculptor puts
amid the bigger gargoyles. Naming two Triangle factory foremen
"Kristol" and "Podhoretz" is a lousy joke, and a sure-fire illusion
killer for every scene in which the two appear.
The
publicity for Dreamlandinevitably pronounces it "in the
tradition of E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime." I would venture
to say, even with all the reservations above, that Dreamlandis
the better book. Its history and biography are less potted, and
more often than not it truly inhabits its characters and era.
There is a coldness to Doctorow's famous and much more pulled-together
novel, a latter-day superiority that doesn't do emotional or moral
justice to the period it's reconstructing. There's nothing arm's-length
about Baker. He loves all the "cigars, and oysters and roasting
corn, the shady characters and the women of bad reputation" he
can crowd onto the page. Ragtimeremains just that, a time,
whereas Baker rightly tries to treat the past as a place, whose
strange shoreline he's just sighted, like one of the startled
immigrants in his bounteous book.
Thomas
Mallon's most recent novels are Henry and Clara and
Dewey Defeats Truman.
Copyright
1999 ©The New York Times Company
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THE
RICHMOND REVIEW
Reviewed by Amanda Jeremin Harris
It's
phenomenal. Read it. It's the actual embodiment of that reviewer's
cliché, the tour de force.
Dreamlandis
partly the story of Esther Abramowitz, a sewing machine worker
from the lower east side of New York City during the 'melting
pot' era, and of her lover Josef (alias 'Kid Twist'). The daughter
of unassimilated Eastern European Jewish emigrants, throughout
the novel Esther becomes the ultimate self-realised woman of the
New York slums. Meanwhile, her brother Lazar (alias 'Gyp the Blood'),
already morally destitute and a gangster at the novel's start
(when Josef prevents him from breaking someone's back), becomes
fully a monster. Baker teases with the suggestion that the love
story of Esther and Josef is another new world Romeo and Juliet
in the vein of West Side Story. However, Esther is far more self-aware
and cynical than either Juliet or Maria could have dreamed of
being. Hard labour from an early age have grown her up into a
remarkably strong woman. In the telling, Baker juxtaposes gritty
realism and weirdness: the love story is told by 'Trick the Dwarf,'
a circus freak by profession, and a dryly poetic narrator. 'Dreamland'
is the name of the Coney Island amusement park where he lives
and works in a dwarf township called the 'Little City' with his
queen 'The Mad Carlotta.'
Another
plot line follows the visit of Doctors Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung,
and Sandor Forenci to America. (This gives the novel's title its
punning significance.) Intermittently, we watch as Freud and Jung
act out their ideological schism, and part intellectual company,
to the slapstick idiot's delight and tune of Forenci's bumbling.
The great schism is played out from Freud's perspective. We do
not so much encounter Freud, 'The Father of Psychoanalysis,' as
we do an ageing, and touchingly fragile man whose empirical reason
vies for control with his grandiosity.
Baker's
very wonderful characterisation establishes Freud (well, Baker's
character at least) as a multi-dimentional person. For the novel's
duration, Freud the man is reclaimed from the unfortunate role
of dour patriarch to which he is often relegated. Clearly a great
deal of research was involved in this characterisation. In Baker's
world, Freud's humour and self-mockery temper his grandiosity.
Baker's fabulous characterisation is important because it gives
humanity to a quasi-historical account. I know historical fiction
is a novelistic genre, not an academic one, but like Philip Roth
before him (the comparison is inevitable) Baker has allowed the
voices of impoverished nineteen-tens New York—a sprawling
mass of emigrants, union workers, corrupt politicians, crime bosses,
prostitutes, etc.-to vivify one very particular moment in time.
Baker has put across the great visceral stink and swarm of tenement
life in particular, and 'melting pot' survival in general, but
without suffocating the reader with a modernist ennui, which I
should think would be the temptation in writing a book of this
sort. Instead, tenement life is shown to possess the impelling
force of the will to survive. Baker's people are like indomitable,
rank weeds.
To
sum up then, there is a sooty lyricism to Baker's writing. Perhaps
this is because he has worked on newspapers from early adolescence.
Perhaps he has managed to merge a crisp, old style journalistic
edge with a very real insight into the multi-facetedness of individuals,
as well as with an awareness of the opposite quality-the impersonal
self-propulsion of life. I could rhapsodise unendingly about Kevin
Baker's skill as a novelist, and ponderously wonder why this book
is so achieved. Instead I will leave you with this thought: Kevin
Baker is the goods.
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