Banished Children of Eve.

Irish history, like the history of the Jewish people, embraces diaspora, exile, suffering, and a vision of the promised land. In his remarkable first novel, Peter Quinn, chief speechwriter for Time Warner, brings a new and formidable talent to the chronicling of Irish wanderings and their outcome. Although the emphasis of the book is on the Irish experience in nineteenth-century New York, Quinn goes beyond it to include on a broader canvas the entire sweep of a history steeped in the bitter fruits of subjugation. Nor does he neglect the Yankees and the free blacks who were so much a part of the New York Civil War tumult, and who were respectively the masters and the foes of the Irish.

As he draws together the strands of his narrative, Quinn moves between Ireland and New York, turning the latter teeming metropolis into a village that becomes his own American Nighttown. Here the immigrants, the "Paddys," go about their dubious business, survival uppermost in their minds, displaced only by the oblivion of a night's drinking. Here, too, they vie with the blacks for the menial jobs they are terrified of losing, and vent their anger and hatred of the Yankee "ratnoses," the Know Nothings or true Americans, who are indifferent to the miserable poverty around them, or prey on it.

These antagonisms and fears erupt in the draft riots of 1863, when the poor of New York battle armed federal troops, using bottles, paving stones, and arson. Out of control, the rioters maim and murder a poor dwarf, Squirt, believed to be the offspring of the lovely Eliza La Plante and her white lover, Jack Mulcahey. When the carnage is over, and the dead are buried, a new direction is indicated for each of the main characters.

And what richly realized characters they are, almost Dickensian in their variety and quirkiness: Jimmy Dunne, likable and resourceful, though hardly the conventional hero, who is rescued from Great Plains servitude by a tornado to become a New York hustler; Eliza, beautiful and a gifted actress, starring in Uncle Tom's Cabin and as well, the light of Jack Mulcahey's life. Mulcahey himself is the greatest of the blackface minstrels, performing his routines nightly to the music of Stephen Foster. And what of Margaret O'Driscoll, devout maidservant ready for the main chance, which could be Dunne?

There are others: Charles Bedford, Wall Street entrepreneur and hustler in a different mode, taking his chances at the faro table in Morrissey's gambling establishment and losing to the implacable owner. And how will this sit with the whining fence, Capshaw, who has Bedford between a rock and knife for improper securities dealings? We encounter, too, Colonel Robert Noonan, administrator of the draft, an honorable man hated by his compatriots who see him as a threat to their independence. Stephen Foster lurches from saloon to saloon, accompanied by his fictional great friend, One-eyed Jack Cassidy.

Over these and a host of minor characters is the brooding figure of Archbishop John Hughes, who truly sees his "banished children of Eve" as the exiles they are, a people wandering in the wilderness, in need of saving. He is determined that it will be he who leads them out of their degraded situations and into the promised land and to this end he is building his cathedral. The scene of Hughes on the scaffolding of the just-begun Saint Patrick's, attended by his sycophantic auxiliary, is one of the most dramatic and at the same time most comical scenes in the novel.

The research that informs the narrative is so smoothly and seamlessly integrated that it would hardly be noticeable were it not for the ebb and flow of the historical underpinnings. Quinn handles with great skill the events of the months leading to the draft riots, and at the same time acquaints the reader with the history of the famine-cursed Irish, the terrible blight that brought about the migration. With tenderness and compassion he describes the pain and sorrow of those famine years in Ireland, the wrenching farewells of parents to children whom they would never see again, the panic and despair of the greenhorns landing at Castle Garden in New York. And the survivors - what of them? Pickpockets, whores, servants: Was being in service to the Protestant Ascendancy any getter than starving in Ireland?

Well, yes. Although Banished Children arrives at no conclusions of this kind, the epilogue opens up possibilities for the future. Here Quinn's controlled sense of irony has full play as he draws the reader beyond the riots into calmer waters. And comedy, too, is one of his gifts, for who could resist his more raffish characters as they reel in and out of bars and brothels, declaiming, singing, cadging drinks. His creations, then, are living, breathing, original habitues of the dens and warrens of nineteenth-century Manhattan. Beyond that they are, some of them, men and women with aspirations, longing for a better life, and with only the thinnest slice of hope to keep them going.

That they have been celebrated in this splendid stew of a book is a tribute to their resilience and to the overflowing life with which they have been filled by their creator. His empathy, knowledge, and masterly narrative have brought them into being. Flawed and broken though they are, these "banished children" are irresistible. Peter Quinn's achievement is to have brought them alive in a historic moment and to have given us a historical novel of stature and breadth.