In the opening lines of The Rackets by Thomas Kelly, the novel’s hero, Jimmy Dolan, looks out at New York’s Hell Gate Bridge, watches a seagull dive for prey in the wake of a police boat, and figures he has “the best job in the world” (p. 3).  These hints of the savagery in the midst of an urban landscape, combined with the satisfaction they seem to inspire in Jimmy Dolan, make it amply clear to readers that we are in that parallel universe of brutality, bravery, and bleak irony that is the natural terrain of the thriller. Thus it is with some surprise that we find Jimmy is not a cop, mobster, or detective, but the “advance man” for the city’s very Rudolf Giuliani–like mayor—a job that is halfway between a flack and a gal Friday. Never fear, however, a cop turns up almost

immediately—a female cop, Jimmy’s girlfriend Tara O’Niel —and in the course of the novel she does, in fact, become a detective.

Such machinations embody the best and the worst of Kelly’s second novel (his first, Payback, published in 1997, has been adapted for film by David Mamet). Kelly is a master of the thriller genre. The Rackets is beautifully plotted and efficiently written. Its final third was so horrifically engrossing that I raced through it during a long train ride without being aware that more than a few minutes had passed.

But The Rackets is also an earnest and heartfelt book that seems to want, not only to give its readers a few pulse-racing hours, but to show something of what it means to be human in this hard and confusing world. And in this regard, Kelly’s allegiance to his genre lets him down. His East River landscape reminds readers less of the real East River than the menacing backdrops of countless other thrillers and cop movies. When he works a variation on the form, for example, by having the cop be a woman or a nurse be a man, it is almost always a switch of one variable for its opposite, which, while it may momentarily surprise, ultimately feels mechanical and does little to lend the characters depth or lifelike complexity. In the case of Tara O’Niel, Kelly works hard to give us her woman’s eye view of the male sex. But in the end, tall, beautiful, blonde, and packing a Glock 9, Tara remains a cross between Laura Croft, Tomb Raider, and a true blue, stand-by-your-man hometown girl—two stereotypes forged mostly from the yearnings of the male ego.

            The Rackets also strives to be a coming-of-age novel, and here, perhaps, is where it is worst served by the conventions of the thriller. In the course of its nearly 400 pages, twenty-nine-year-old Jimmy Dolan is supposedly rid of the naive misunderstandings that had been nourished during childhood and by his college education. While the technical details of Gracie Mansion, construction sites, and police operations certainly ring true (Kelly put himself through Fordham University by working construction, and he later became an advance man to former New York mayor David Dinkins), the “real world” that Jimmy Dolan supposedly wakens to is so dense with regulation-issue psycho hit men, shady Feds, and cinematic homicides (one top Mafioso even meets his end while tending his garden à la Marlon Brando in The Godfather) that it feels, at best, only tangentially related to real world Kelly wants to illuminate. We put the book down with elevated endorphin levels and a slight clamminess in the palms, but feeling neither educated nor moved.

The main action of The Rackets centers on the struggle to end the thirty-year reign of Frankie Keefe, the corrupt secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 383. At the start of the novel, that struggle is being waged almost single-handedly, it would seem, by Mike Dolan, Jimmy’s father.  Mike is the mythic hero of countless organizing songs:  the ordinary working stiff who, when things get desperate, decides to put his life on the line for his union. He is a doting but never sappy father, a widower who sees going out with other women as a pointless affront to the memory of his dead wife, and the possessor of all the iron humility of Gary Cooper in High Noon.  Without making a single shady deal or moral compromise, and without taking any action more concrete than handing out homemade leaflets outside of union meetings, Mike somehow attracts enough underground support, presumably through the sheer magnetism of his moral decency,  to have a real chance of unseating Keefe as secretary-treasurer in the upcoming

election—the first in the local’s history to have secret ballots.

Jimmy, by contrast, starts the novel as decidedly compromised. He has become a traitor to his class by going to college and getting a white-collar job, and to his politics by working for a Republican mayor. Jimmy gets his shot at moral redemption when he half-accidentally knocks over Frankie Keefe in front of a pack of press photographers. The next day all the city’s papers carry humiliating photos of Keefe sprawled flat on his back, and Jimmy is both jobless and homeless, having been fired by the mayor and kicked out by his spoiled but ambitious yuppie girlfriend, who apparently has a Palm Pilot where her heart ought to have been.

With no alternatives, Jimmy moves back to his father’s apartment in Inwood (at the northern tip of Manhattan), where he reunites with his former best friend, a hard-drinking, gun-running, Gulf War vet named Liam, and with his high school sweetheart, Tara. He types up his resume and makes a couple of phone calls only to learn that, thanks to the influence of the infuriated Keefe, he is not likely to find government work anytime soon. Liam comes to the rescue by getting Jimmy a job on the cement crew at a downtown construction site, coincidentally the very site where Mike Dolan has just started working as shop steward. Thus it is that Jimmy and Liam happen to be witnesses the night that Mike is shot dead by a Russian hit man hired by Tommy “Magic” Vamonte, Frankie Keefe’s Mafioso brother-in-law and boss.

In the wake of his father’s death, Jimmy feels that he has only two alternatives: killing Keefe (who he believes responsible for the murder) or driving him out of office. Less heroic measures, like letting the police handle the crime, never get half a second’s serious consideration in this sort of novel. In the end, of course, Jimmy decides to step into his father’s shoes and run for secretary-treasurer, thus thoroughly redeeming himself for his past betrayals of class and politics.

In the process, however, Jimmy strides ever deeper into a smoke-and-mirrors landscape in which mobsters, politicians, union officials, and federal investigators all engage in a realpolitick that makes them morally indistinguishable. To nobody’s surprise, except possibly his father’s in the afterlife, Jimmy learns that he can’t be simultaneously an effective advocate for the working man and the possessor of a spotless virtue. Inevitably, some morally desirable goals have to be sacrificed to achieve others. The key to success in the “real world” is the recognition that “nothing’s on the level” (p. 374).

Kelly manages to juggle a remarkable number of narrative lines all at once. In addition to the conflict between the Dolans and Frankie Keefe, readers are kept in suspense about the progress of two separate love stories, Keefe’s often comic dealings with his still powerful, but ailing brother-in-law, Tommy Magic; Magic’s attempts to form an alliance with the up-and-coming Russian “Mafia”; and the machinations of the chillingly amoral Federal investigator, Roth, who is the main force that determines whose plans will come to fruition and whose will be thwarted.

Roth will happily promote mob interests or destroy promising union reformers if he thinks it will advance his investigation and career. Thus his character may well bring comfort to supporters of Ron Carey, the Irish-American who ran on an anticorruption slate to become president of the Teamsters in 1991 and turned back a challenge from Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. in 1996, only to be thrown out of office and the union in 1998 as a result of a Federal investigation. In most other ways, however, The Rackets  unlike novels such as John Sayles’s Union Dues, is too stripped down and formulaic to give us a terribly authentic or original vision of unions today. Ultimately, the main function of the Teamsters in this novel is to provide the pretext and setting for the dramatic action, much as a precinct house, a newspaper, or a presidential election might in other thrillers.

The most inspired and passionate parts of The Rackets are those where Kelly writes about the alienation, rage, and self-loathing of the Irish-American working class. With the exception of a couple of Italians, a couple of Russians, and a couple of Jews, all of the significant characters in the novel are of Irish extraction. Even the city’s Guiliani-like mayor is half-Irish. And the father of one of the Jews was not only a member of the once largely Irish Tranport Worker’s Union, but changed the family name from Kronenberg to Cronin.

Most of the novel’s protagonists are natives of Inwood, which was heavily populated by Irish from shortly before the Second World War until the early nineteen 1970s, when substantial numbers of Dominican immigrants began to move in and many of the more affluent Irish residents fled to the suburbs. As Kelly portrays it, the transformation of the neighborhood is disturbing to its long-time residents in big and little ways.

Soon after moving back with his father, Jimmy is disconcerted to walk past “three storefront botánicas displaying tropical interpretations of saints. All three had been Irish bars” (p. 109).  Mike Dolan’s rich but alcoholic brother, Punchy, is beaten and robbed of everything he has on him, including his clothes, by a gang of Dominican teenagers. One character, Last Stand Sweeney (named in honor of the doomed General George Armstrong Custer), launches a one-man protest movement, asserting that since whites are now a minority in the neighborhood, they ought to benefit from affirmative action.

For the most part, however, whatever resentment Kelly’s characters might feel toward their new neighbors is blunted by the sense that the Dominicans are really much like themselves, just another immigrant group trying to make it in a country that wants little to do with them. While most of Kelly’s Inwood natives are not, in the strictest sense, immigrants (they, their parents, and sometimes their grandparents were born in the United States), a mix of cultural ties and, especially, class anxieties makes them feel alien within their own country.  Their fiercest anger is not directed at their Dominican neighbors but at the affluent residents of the lower half of Manhattan, whose manner and ways of living seem both more truly foreign and more deeply threatening.

Pete Cronin, Frankie Keefe’s driver, watches a group of businessmen sharing a bottle of champagne and envies them: “They seemed oblivious to all but their own good fortune. He dealt in half-truths, lies and violence, and operated on the cold margins of a system that these revelers knew little about” (p. 226).  In another part of the book Cronin marvels at the fact that wealthy New Yorkers “grew up on the same small island he did but sounded like they came from somewhere very far away” (p. 128).  Mike Dolan uses almost the same language when he observes the sophisticated customers of Union Square farmers market: “All these people lived in a different world, sharing this same, small island” (p. 99).  Then, a short while later, those same customers watch “with curiosity” (p. 100) as Keefe and his thugs emerge from a Teamsters meeting.

The envy, wonder, and curiosity that such glancing intersections of these separate worlds inspire in some of Kelly’s characters become something more ferocious in the rare instances when a solitary member of one social class strays into the territory of the other.  Liam and Jimmy, for example, take great pleasure when a yuppie with a cell phone is first refused service in the bar where they are having an after-work drink and is then, when he dares to complain, insulted and thrown out onto the street by their buddy the bartender. Jimmy himself is a victim of a similar ejection when he dares to cross class lines in the opposite direction. His debacle with Frankie Keefe is only half of the reason his yuppie girlfriend throws him out of her apartment. The other is that to this ambitious and snooty young woman, despite his college education and career, Jimmy remains, fundamentally, a working-class Mick.

Such confrontations, justly and unjustly, inspire rage in Kelly’s characters. But as is so often the case among immigrant or otherwise alienated groups, the deepest rages are most often directed inward. When the millionaire, Punchy Dolan, complains to his brother Mike, “only in an Irish family can the guy who goes out and hustles . . . be the black sheep,” Mike responds: “You know, your problem is that you think staying true to what you are means you’re a failure. I don’t have a problem with who I am” (p. 64). Although the brothers appear to be arguing, they are in fact saying the same thing. For these Irish-Americans, like the members of many another disenfranchised ethnic group, certain kinds of success, especially academic and economic success, are seen as forms of dishonesty and a betrayal—not just of one’s people, but one’s self. One of the reasons Punchy is a hopeless gambler and alcoholic—a “rum-dum” as his brother calls him

(p. 65)—is the anguish—very like survivor’s guilt—inspired by his supposed alienation from his people and his “true” self.

Jimmy doesn’t stray nearly so far from the old neighborhood as his uncle. Even when he spends his days at the right hand of New York’s mayor, he still finds time to go back to the bars he frequented in his youth and is seen by everyone there as a regular guy. Even so, he feels guilty: “When he had finished school and made the change to the professional world, he felt as if he was cheating somehow, that if you were not sweating you were not working” (p. 189).  Thus Jimmy finds it a great relief when Liam gets him a job working construction.

In its broadest outlines, The Rackets is the story of how one working-class Mick attempts to heal the psychic strains caused by upward mobility. At the beginning of the book Jimmy’s brains, education, ambition, and career have all led him into an untenable compromise with his deepest values. In choosing to run for secretary-treasurer of Local 383, he finds a way to use all of these elements for the benefit of the community he had thought he had to leave behind. It is the perfect solution. And one can’t help wondering whether Thomas Kelly didn’t find a similar solution  by telling Jimmy’s story.