Metropolis is the first novel by Gaffney, an editor for the Paris Review who appears, judging by the blurbs with which the novel is festooned, to be well-connected in literary circles. Everything is viewed through an agreeably sepia haze, and at any moment one expects to hear the tinkle of a Scott Joplin rag. Barnum, Evelyn Nesbit, Teddy Roosevelt), its celebrated structures and places (the Brooklyn Bridge, Madison Square Garden, Fifth Avenue) and its romantic (or so it seems in hindsight) underworld. Like the former's Ragtime and the latter's The Alienist, her Metropolis is set in the distant, oddly magical world of Old New York, with its larger-than-life figures (P.T. $24.95Elizabeth Gaffney seems to have read E.L. Metropolis marks a superb fiction debut.Random House. In a novel that is wonderfully written, rich in suspense, vivid historical detail, breathtakingly paced, Elizabeth Gaffney captures the wonder and magic of a rambunctious city in a time of change. Buffeted by the forces of fate, hate, luck, and passion, our hero struggles to build a life–just to stay alive–in a country that at first held so much promise for him.Įpic in sweep, Metropolis follows our hero from his arrival in New York harbor through his experiences in Barnum’s circus, the criminal underground, and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and on to a life in Brooklyn that is at once unique and poignantly emblematic of the American experience.

Barnum’s stable, where he works and sleeps, and soon finds himself at the center of a citywide arson investigation.ĭetermined to clear his name and realize the dreams that inspired his hazardous voyage across the Atlantic, he will change his identity many times, find himself mixed up with one of the city’s toughest and most enterprising gangs, and fall in love with a smart, headstrong, and beautiful young woman. On a freezing night in the middle of winter, Gaffney’s nameless hero is suddenly awakened by a fire in P. Elizabeth Gaffney’s magnificent, Dickensian Metropolis captures the splendor and violence of America’s greatest city in the years after the Civil War, as young immigrants climb out of urban chaos and into the American dream.

Metropolis by Elizabeth Gaffney