SOURCE: "A New York History," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4782, November 25, 1994, p. 20.

[In the following mixed review of Banished Children of Eve, Walsh argues that Quinn is not entirely successful handling the vastness of his narrative and the large number of characters.]

The lonely farmer's wife, in Peter Quinn's novel [Banished Children of Eve], who seduces a young Irish orphan from New York sent to the cold western prairies for moral reeducation, shares with him her tantalized imaginings of the distant city: "My husband says it's a wicked place, noisy, dirty, impious. Says that most of the people don't work, live off politics and that criminals abound and whores and drunkards are everywhere. It belongs to the foreigners he says, and let them have it. America's got no use for it."

This anarchic vista is the mood with which Peter Quinn has infused his long novel about...