The Bronx, 1988. The Loew's Paradise on the Grand Concourse is a four-thousand-seat movie palace with a sky painted on the ceiling and three hundred electric stars, half of them burned out. Alfredo "Freddy" Mendoza is seventeen, filling a marble notebook every eleven days and showing them to nobody. Then a girl comes around the corner of the concession counter, tells him he is doing it wrong, and mentions, while they are counting cups in the stockroom, that she intends to run the world.
Ilana Gabriel is going to get out. Her mother lifts human beings for a living at a nursing home on Bainbridge and her hands are failing at forty-one, and Ilana has decided to be faster than that. For two years there is a tar roof, a red pen in the margins of his notebooks, and a promise made in a locked balcony under a ceiling that a man in 1929 built for people who could not afford cathedrals.
In December of 1990, three days before Christmas, she ends it on a street corner in under four minutes, and the way she does it is unforgivable, and it makes him a writer.
Fifteen years later Alfredo is closing on a brownstone on West 81st Street with the money from a novel about a girl in a movie theater. On the third floor of the real estate office, at a desk with a nameplate in a slot, is Ilana Gabriel, executive assistant, answering to a name that is not hers.
They take the D train back to the Bronx and sit in a diner on Fordham Road that still has the same broken neon, and he asks her to start at the car.
THE PARADISE is a novel about the doors that open for some people and not for others, about what a wound is worth once you finally set it down, and about a writer who needs the ending badly enough to go and get it, no matter what is printed on the last page. Told in the voice of a man turning his own life in the light until the seam shows, it is a book for readers of Junot Diaz, Ernesto Quinonez, and anyone who has ever loved a room that no longer exists.
