Payback.

A page-turner buttressed by ethnic conflict, mob vengeance, and the twists and turns of family loyalty, Payback is a violent tour through some of New York City's least fashionable precincts. Thomas Kelly's evocation of Manhattan's West Side and the North Bronx, which to this day maintain a large Irish presence of both old and new immigrants, makes this first novel a commendable fusion of sociology and crime fiction.

As Payback unfolds, the loyalties among Kelly's various ethnic, labor, and criminal organizations shift and collapse. As ruthless as his characters, the author spills blood generously, and fills the body bags with a reckless abandon, giving Payback a decidedly Hollywood feel. Of course, one reason Payback would translate to the screen quite well is its reliance on familiar, occasionally cliched, premises and characterizations. At the center of the story are Billy and Paddy Adare, a sort of Hell's Kitchen resurrection of Cain and Abel. Billy, the good brother, has educated himself and is working union construction jobs while waiting to hear from Columbia Law School. Paddy, a former boxer, remains a top officer in Jack Tierney's criminal empire. Tierney is Payback's chief heavy, a hood who "through creative use of threat and force...ran the lucrative construction rackets on the West Side." (Kelly himself is a former construction worker turned Fordham- and Harvard-educated union organizer.)

The novel, set in the economic boom of the 1980s, is loaded with trusty Irish-American signifiers, including generous amounts of drink, nostalgia, and rebel song, not to mention the requisite JFK portrait and crucifix hanging in grandfather Adare's Bronx apartment. Still, as a former "sandhog," Kelly depicts the insular life and work of New York's underground tunnel excavators with enough detail and feeling to make you want to wipe the sweat, grime, and dust from your own forehead.

Payback also registers an intense reverence for union workers, their humble lives and noble cause, and is wholly contemptuous of WASPs, the wealthy, suburbanites, yuppies, anti-union Reaganites, and even the educated Irish who attempt to erase their backgrounds. Thus, Billy's crisis is the imminent clash of the cosmopolitan world ahead of him and the close-knit world behind him. That has long been the crisis of many ethnic Catholics, from author and Daily News editor Pete Hamill to writer Richard Rodriguez, who were the first members of their families to go to college, to rub elbows with the well-spoken and well-scrubbed.

Kelly doesn't complicate things - we never meet a decent yuppie. Characterization and local color predominate, while the tension and mayhem of the plot is moved to the fore. Still, a noirish condemnation of Reagan-era greed is implicit in the story, and Kelly does probe the difficulties that the Reagan mystique presented to many blue-collar Democrats, even having the portrait of JFK in one Irish home replaced with that of Reagan.

The novel shifts into high gear when it becomes clear that Jack Tierney has turned on Paddy. At this point, the expansive, nearly Dickensian cast of characters begins to dwindle in a succession of bloody executions. This occurs as Billy's union calls a strike, which itself allows for the odd bit of bomb-throwing and gunplay. Family members are threatened or killed, chases through tenements and subway stations ensue, and hostages are taken, setting the stage for a final, decisive showdown.

At its best, Payback is a well-structured, tautly paced yarn of murder and politics, labor and ethnicity, long on action if short on subtlety. Occasionally heavy-handed and two-dimensional, Payback is nonetheless a credible peek into an unsavory, unfamiliar world, an improvement, for example, on the rather flat 1990 Sean Penn film State of Grace, which also explored modern Irish gangs from the West Side.

It is something of a mystery why, after a century-and-a-half of Irish presence and influence in what's been called the "most Irish city in the union," there has never been a canonical Irish-American novel of New York City, no Irish Call It Sleep, or New York Studs Lonigan. Although Payback doesn't aspire to these heights, its conflicting attitudes toward education may begin to explain this gaping cultural hole. And Kelly does bring at least some of the knowledge that Henry Roth and James T. Farrell brought to their respective masterpieces: that despite the multitudes, the big city can be a very small place, and that despite the bright lights, a city's best stories are usually found in the shadows - or even underground.

Tom Deignan teaches American cultural studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. His writing has appeared in the Irish Voice and other publications.