The Albany Cycle: The Ink Truck, Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn’s Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe.
by William Kennedy

Reviewed by Kurt Opprecht

The budget battle in Albany has run its course this year, giving New Yorkers their annual reminder in the press that the Big Apple isn’t always at the top of the food chain. In the fictional world, Albany coverage can be more constant. William Kennedy has been writing novels set in that little town up the Hudson since way back when the state legislature passed the budget on schedule. In his latest installment, Roscoe Conway is a Democratic Party boss in the days when the leadership actually ran the party, not to mention the town and the politicians. The work is an encouraging addition to the Albany Cycle, evidence that Mr. Kennedy, now 73, is still master of his craft, despite fears to the contrary based on his previous effort, "The Flaming Corsage."

Mr. Kennedy grew up in Albany and has lived there his whole life, minus a few years he worked out of state as a journalist, including a stint in Puerto Rico as managing editor of the "San Juan Star." Since 1963, he has devoted himself to chronicling the city in fiction.

Kennedy’s first three novels, "The Ink Truck" (1969), "Legs" (1975), and "Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game" (1978), didn’t receive much attention until his fourth, "Ironweed" (1983), snagged the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1984. In it, Francis Phelan, (Billy’s father) wanders Albany’s streets homeless and destitute, spending time with equally unfortunate fellow men and women and vaguely coming to terms with his own guilt at having accidentally, yet fatally dropped his infant son and having abandoned his family in shame. "Ironweed" has an alluring ethereal quality that draws the reader into the world of its homeless protagonists. Much like the ghosts in the novel, Francis and his associates seem to inhabit Albany in their own separate protected dimension.

Kennedy followed up the success of "Ironweed" with "Quinn’s Book" (1988), "Very Old Bones" (1992), and "The Flaming Corsage" (1996).

"Roscoe" opens on VJ-Day in 1945; Albany is full of revelers and Roscoe is telling his cohorts that he has decided to "retire." Events don’t cooperate with Roscoe’s plans, and the narrative bounces back and forth from that point in time, covering Roscoe’s brief marriage, his service in WWI, and a childhood romance. Mixed in are his wheelings and dealings in venues from courtrooms to fighting cock pits.

The novel has Kennedy’s best tricks in it, one of which is the subtle and unannounced slip into the surreal. In a flashback to 1917, Roscoe’s father, Felix Conway, the "thrice elected, once-ejected mayor of Albany" is meeting with fellow Democrats when he’s asked a question he finds particularly humorous:

the laughter, paroxysmal now, seals Felix’s throat and bloats him with its containment. He floats up from his chair, still with a smile as wide as his head, and he rises like a hot-air balloon, caroming off the balustrade of the Tennessee-marble stairway, and he keeps rising on up to collide with the lobby’s French chandelier, where he explodes in a final thunderclap of a laugh, sending crystal shards raining down onto Eddie McDermott, the terrified reformer below.

Such flights of fancy pop up in Kennedy’s novels like surprise nuggets in a Christmas bread.

Another Kennedy slight of hand is his expert work with the dead. Kennedy’s ghosts find their way into his narratives so insidiously, I’m often halfway into a dialog before I remember that the person speaking died pages ago, or novels ago.

Are Kennedy’s characters just print versions of actual Albany figures? In the author’s note to "Roscoe," Kennedy says he doesn’t "do that sort of thing," that they are all invented characters, although they "might be better than their prototypes (if they have any)." Fans of Kennedy’s fiction may wish to read his non-fiction works, "Oh Albany!" and "Riding the Yellow Trolley Car," if only to settle in their minds how much of the fiction is or is not based on fact.

In general, the novels of the Albany Cycle are at their best when the author takes us into the lives of people who probably wouldn’t be hanging out with us book-reading types: "bartenders and waitresses, burglars on relief, family outcasts and runaways, semi-affluent winos who could still pay rent, motherless queens, hula dancers, B-girls and strippers, horseplayers doing their best to die broke, . . . and all the flakes, flacks, and flukes who got around to putting their heads on their greasy pillows just as the sun was also rising..." quoting from Kennedy’s description of Albany’s night world in "Roscoe."

Unlike the grotesques of Sherwood Anderson’s "Winesburg, Ohio" or the mentally deficient protagonists of Erskine Caldwell’s novels, Kennedy avoids the dramatic extremes and the caricatures, conveying instead a warm-hearted respect for his characters. The low-lifes in Mr. Kennedy’s novels bear a deep resemblance to people we already know, and deliberately steer clear of, yet from the safety of our reading chair we allow ourselves to feel empathy, perhaps even guilt for taking the vicarious pleasure, and maybe some chagrin for our own uneventful lives.

Mr. Kennedy portrays his more fortunate types, such as Roscoe, with the same warm realism, but they fall short of being actually interesting. Like characters in a black and white movie you can’t remember if you’ve seen before, many of Kennedy’s less economically challenged major players seem to have come from clip-art book number seventy-five: "Wise Guys and Dames." His skill in fleshing out characters is too often wasted on run-of-the-mill louts and molls.

"Ironweed" is a creative contribution to American literature, justifiably a must-read. But much of the rest of the Cycle is a bit like Felix Conway, who got off the ground, but stopped short of crashing through the lobby ceiling.

I suspect that William Kennedy is consciously pulling back from the sheltered realm of literature. "Ironweed" may have been quite as close as he wanted to get, thank you. With one or two exceptions, the novels of the Albany Cycle are substantial works of fiction, not graphically sexual or militarily violent enough to earn silver-embossed paperback covers, but still the kind of books that the characters in them might actually read; and that seems right, somehow.

Kurt Opprecht is a writer in Manhattan who has been to the real-world Albany exactly once, to catch a train.