THE IRISH SOPRANOS.

The Rackets
Thomas Kelly
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24, 384 pp.

The Tara Irish Gift Shop on 207th Street in Manhattan, way uptown in Inwood, recently announced that it would close its doors forever. For years the shop, with its Claddagh trinkets and racks of the Donegal Democrat, had been a merely vestigial Irish presence in an enclave that had long since become an outpost of the Dominican Republic.

Tom Kelly knows old and new Inwood intimately, as the Teamster-turned-novelist makes clear in his bloody new union saga The Rackets.

   When Liam was born there had been forty-nine Irish bars in the
   neighborhood; when he had his first beer at thirteen there had been about
   twenty. Now there were maybe five, all populated by a few toothless ghosts,
   waiting for the afterlife to begin.

The Rackets is Kelly's follow-up to his first book, Payback. The novels are similar in many ways. Each centers round a blue-collar kid who made good, but who must return to the 'hood to settle a score. Corpses and profanities are plentiful. Soft-handed yuppies are scorned. Good and evil duel to the death.

The Rackets, however, has grander ambitions. At its best, it does for New York's working-class enclaves what Bonfire of the Vanities did for Gotham's ultrarich. Kelly gives his various ethnic subcultures thick social landscapes, their own language and psychology, politics and mores. On this score, Kelly ranks up there with Denis and Pete Hamill, and with Jimmy Breslin (who, incidentally, makes a cameo in The Rackets). Kelly draws up a large, impressive, even diverse, cast of Irish cops and gunrunners, Italian mobsters and mistresses, Russian immigrants and killers, saints and scoundrels. Queens, Inwood, Brooklyn, and Jersey are the settings. The struggle to move from working- to middle- (or criminal upper-) class are both poignant and pathetic. Yes, you will be reminded of "The Sopranos."

"Only in an Irish family," one racketeering character laments, "can the guy who...becomes a millionaire...be the black sheep."

At times, Kelly relies too heavily on the trappings of his genre. Things that could be left ambiguous or implied are needlessly made explicit. Characters in The Rackets tend to be of the black hat/ white hat variety. Jimmy Hoffa's cynical epigram, "Every man has his price, what's yours?" is meant to set the tone. But we quickly learn who will or won't sell out. Kelly's moral compass is more Christ in Concrete than, say, On the Waterfront. (Interestingly, unlike those labor classics, the church is only a minor presence in this tale of contemporary New York.)

Kelly's protagonist, Jimmy Dolan, organizes public appearances--a job Kelly himself held under David Dinkins--for a no-nonsense white Republican mayor with a bad comb-over. A scuffle with mobbed-up Teamster Frankie Keefe costs Jimmy his job. That Jimmy's saintly dad, Mike, is challenging Keefe for a union leadership post means that both Dolans will soon be in grave danger.

Soon we meet Tara O'Neil, Jimmy's ex from Inwood, and Liam Brady, a sort of urban gun nut, who becomes Jimmy's bodyguard when Jimmy is forced to challenge Keefe in his father's place. Tara and Jimmy flirt, and confront their turbulent past. Jimmy and Liam (not an anti-Semitic, black-helicopter type of gun nut, Kelly assures us) also spar, though we never really doubt Jimmy's loyalty to salt-of-the-earth Inwood. An interesting twist might have been to give Jimmy a close white-collar friend from the dreaded 'burbs. But Kelly's only sin against class loyalty is to have Jimmy living--briefly--with a contemptible socialite.

The tight union election gives Kelly reason to ratchet up the violence. Ruthless, up-and-coming Russians, and calculating criminal/informer types make life difficult for the old-time mob. ("Keefe had brilliantly played both sides of the fence for years. As a top-echelon informer he fed both friends and enemies alike to keep himself in power.")

Kelly is laudably ruthless when it comes to who lives and dies in The Rackets. The novel's most memorable descriptions and stinging asides ("Liam wondered about [an immigrant] traveling ten thousand miles to sell Duracells on the A train") capture its great strength: Kelly's feel for New York's less fashionable people and precincts. The people, it so happens, who keep the city up and running.

The resolution of broader social conflict--cop shootings, racism, the class resentment and impoverished past of white ethnics--is handled less convincingly. Kelly's negative view of Giuliani-fied New York feels a bit glib. In a Saint Patrick's Day parade scene, Jimmy stares at his loathsome ex-boss, the mayor, for whom "suburbanites howled...[and the mayor] validated their abandonment, their white flight...He vanquished the grubby panhandlers, the bums, the squeegee men, the dangerous darkies, put the welfare cheats in their place. 'We love you, Mayor!' screamed a sixtyish woman next to him wearing a Massapequa High School jacket."

When Jimmy tells the lady to "Shush up" she "wheeled on him and came up on her toes, a thick homemaker finger in his face. 'F--k off, buster,' she growled in toxic Brooklynese."

Troubling as Giuliani's excesses have been, it's important to note that New York's own excesses--yes, including those once ubiquitous panhandlers and squeegee men--paved the way for his ascendancy. Following Kelly's "homemaker" back to Massapequa would also shed some light on New York's recent complex evolution.

Kelly, of course, is not writing a political treatise. Like Payback (picked up for a film by tough-guy playwright/director David Mamet), The Rackets is a slam-bang thriller built on shrewd social and psychological observation. It's funny when it should be, and as authentically New York as a deafening subway screech or a dirty-water hot dog.

Tom Deignan, an editor and columnist for the Irish Voice in Manhattan, is working on a novel called Staten Islanders. He has taught history, English, and film at CUNY and Saint John's University.