Quinn's Book
To a writer, the most poignant character in Albert Camus’ La Peste (1947; The Plague, 1948) is Joseph Grand, a municipal clerk with dreams of literary glory. Grand has spent years crafting a masterpiece, but all he has to show is a solitary sentence endlessly rewritten. Yet Grand is confident that some day an important editor will read his completed manuscript and proclaim: “Hats off!”
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction provides just such a fantasy of lifted hats, and two Kennedys—John Kennedy Toole and William Kennedy—have enacted contrasting parables of Pulitzer recognition. Toole was an earnest young New Orleans author who was devastated when his first novel was rejected by some two dozen publishers. After his suicide, Toole’s mother continued the campaign to get the book printed. When she finally succeeded, with a bit of help from Louisiana author Walker Percy, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) became a commercial and critical triumph. Posthumous winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 1981, Toole did not live to see the literary world remove its hats to him.
William Kennedy managed to get his first novel, The Ink Truck (1969) published, though very few noticed, and editors were not demonstrably eager to see him again. Several books later, Ironweed (1983) was turned down by almost everyone, until Nobel laureate Saul Bellow interceded on its behalf. When finally published, the novel won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize, and its middle-aged author, a former newspaperman, awoke to find himself rich and famous, a happy sailor in a sea of hatless heads.
Kennedy begins his fifth novel, Quinn’s Book, with an epigraph from Camus: “... a man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” The attention that Quinn’s Book received testifies to the fact that the world has at last discovered its author, whose characters—in five novels—conduct a trek toward self-discovery.
Kennedy has become the unlikely bard of Albany, New York, which he has made his Dublin, his Wessex, and his Yoknapatawpha County and which he celebrates in his personalized chronicle O Albany! An Urban Tapestry (1983). Quinn’s Book, like the “Albany Cycle” of Legs (1975), Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978), and Ironweed, is set in the New York capital, as well as nearby Saratoga and in New York City. It begins in December, 1849, with a daring scene of cataclysm, necrophilia, and resurrection. A burly boatman aptly named John the Brawn retrieves the inanimate body of erotic dancer Magdalena Colón from the icy Hudson River. His torrid copulation with her comely corpse brings it back to vivid life. Magdalena is soon able to resume her career as “one of the great philanthropists in the entire history of sensuality.”
Daniel Quinn, John’s fourteen-year-old assistant, witnesses this rescue and resuscitation, and he himself saves Magdalena’s twelve-year-old niece Maud Fallon from the frigid waters. It will take fifteen years and the length of the novel before the younger couple can consummate their love. The narrative is Quinn’s book, his autobiographical account of coming-of-age, as a nineteenth century American, a lover, and a writer. The unschooled Quinn is the plucky hero of his own Horatio Alger story, though his success is measured in proudly chosen words, his own flamboyant display of literary prowess.
To write his book, Quinn must first experience the luxury of life with an Albany Dutch plutocrat and the threat to it posed by a clandestine, sinister syndicate, called the Society, that controls the region. He witnesses the desperate plight...
(This entire section contains 1623 words.)
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of fugitive slaves and of freed blacks tyrannized by poor whites who are fearful of cheaper labor. He is present when Irish immigrants and native workers clash in urban warfare. His worldly education is abetted by thugs, fops, spiritualists, courtesans, and bounty hunters, and particularly by a newspaper editor named—perhaps with a wink at William Kennedy—Will Canaday. Quinn is described by Kennedy as “that orphan of life,” and Canaday proves more capable than John the Brawn as a surrogate father. As a famous correspondent, Quinn covers some of the grisliest battles of an uncivil Civil War. He returns to a world of draft riots, horse races, boxing matches, and theater extravaganzas, and he is intent on making sense, and art, of it all.
Quinn is both spider and fly in what he calls “a web of escalating significance.” Quinn’s Book is a nineteenth century American circus, but it is also a story of the education of a writer. At first, Quinn can barely read and is so culturally illiterate that he thinks that the Mexican War was fought in Canada, but he evolves from typesetter to journalist to nascent poet. His growing intimation that “if I used words well, the harmony that lurked beneath all contraries and cacophonies must be revealed” leads to dissatisfaction with the randomness of reportage. “I was so busy accumulating and organizing facts and experiences,” he laments, “that I had failed to perceive that only in the contemplation of mystery was revelation possible; only in confronting the incomprehensible and arcane could there be any synthesis.”
Quinn’s Book is a tour de force of historical re-creation, a book that revels in the textures of the past. Its windy opening sentence is a breathless piece of ventriloquism, an attempt both to celebrate the self-conscious grandiloquence of an upstart autodidact a century ago and to mock it:I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns, set eyes on Maud the wondrous on a late December day in 1849 on the banks of the river of aristocrats and paupers, just as the great courtesan, Magdalena Colón, also known as La Última, a woman whose presence turned men into spittling, masturbating pigs, boarded a skiff to carry her across the river’s icy water from Albany to Greenbush, her first stop en route to the city of Troy, a community of iron, where later that evening she was scheduled to enact, yet again, her role as the lascivious Lais, that fabled prostitute who spurned Demosthenes’ gold and yielded without fee to Diogenes, the virtuous, impecunious tub-dweller.
The references to the triumph of virtue over vice, to a perilous journey, and to the powers of feminine mystery are portentous for the entire novel. Kennedy’s ear for the era’s florid rhetoric is well displayed by the lines he attributes to his narrator, but it is a precious style that would be difficult to sustain through an entire novel, and he soon abandons it in favor of a less ostentatious record of the adventures and impressions of his scribbler protagonist.
It is through Quinn’s contemporary eyes, however, that the reader experiences a day at the races in old Saratoga and the 1863 New York Draft Riots. It is over his shoulder that one reads the Albany Telescope’s account of a prizefight written by one Butter McCall, “a bare-knuckle bard, a fistic philosopher, a poet of the poke,” whose linguistic flourishes transform the event into a mock epic. Kennedy is bemused by the ethnic tensions and ethical dilemmas of a past that is not yet so remote from the present.
After Magdalena’s apparently lifeless corpse is retrieved from its encounter with the frigid Hudson, it is brought to a room in the Staats mansion that is known as the dood-kamer: dead-chamber. She, like Dirck Staats, is effectually revived from the dead; indeed, revivification forms a central motif of the entire, animate novel. It is essentially the pattern followed by Quinn himself when he succeeds in reviving his lost love and in redeeming his lost life by bringing it back in vivid words.
Throughout, Quinn harbors intimations of something more powerful and more permanent than the random and quotidian. The solitary family heirloom that accompanies him on his travels is a mysterious circular metal disk that Quinn senses is somehow connected to his destiny but that he never fully fathoms. His tale abounds in supernatural and parapsychological phenomena that suggest the limits of journalistic positivism, both for author Kennedy and for his aspiring alter ego Quinn. While Kennedy has clearly researched the period thoroughly enough to provide convincing reportage on a visit to the theater or a political rally in upstate New York a century ago, he is drawn to séances and phrenological sessions that point to a reality that transcends a bare recitation of details. His characterization of a virtuous orphan making his way alone through a perilous world suggests Dickensian caricature more than documentary realism, and his extravagant style and deployment of events resembles the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Márquez.
Quinn’s Book represents Quinn’s Proustian triumph in forging a coherent identity through a tumultuous span of two decades. As much as the revivified corpse of Magdalena, it is, ultimately, the narrator who is reborn and redeemed, through elusive powers that he is finally able to elicit. Quinn’s retrospective account is addressed explicitly and passionately to Maud, and his final lines point, at last, to their union. After all the exigencies of their separate lives, the novel offers a glimpse of the transcendent possibilities of art and love.
Quinn’s Book is too disjunctive and whimsical, however, to be quite the majestic verbal synthesis that Daniel Quinn contemplates. Yet it is the kind of fantasy of achievement that newspapermen such as the younger Albert Camus and William Kennedy entertained and with which they learned to entertain others. Within every journalist lurks the soul of a bard. Usually, it should stay there. Anyone who wears a newsroom visor, however, ought to doff it to the author of Quinn’s Book.
Ideas for Group Discussions
Brimming with layers of social history, Quinn’s Book serves as a treasure trove for engaging and thought-provoking dialogue. Kennedy masterfully intertwines pivotal social events to highlight their dynamic interplay. He deftly weaves together the threads of the Irish migration, slavery, and the Civil War, crafting a compelling tapestry of historical interpretation. His primary tool is vivid characterization, where characters traverse multiple significant events, linking Irish Americans with escaped slaves and anchoring both within the Civil War's turbulent backdrop. Thus, delving into the personal narratives of these characters invariably leads to a rich exploration of America’s social history, potentially offering insights into our contemporary perspectives on mid-nineteenth-century American lives.
Discussion Questions
1. Which other novels incorporate the Civil War within a bildungsroman, charting the evolution and education of their protagonists? In what ways does Quinn’s Book stand alongside or apart from these narratives?
2. Consider the weight of Emmett Daugherty's words, "But if lost it is, then some say this is the land to be lost in, for it all comes right again here." What layers of meaning do these words reveal about Daugherty’s character? Might this sentiment resonate with the Irish characters as a shared belief?
3. Does the reconciliation between Quinn and Maud hold believability? What impact does this resolution have on the novel’s overarching themes?
4. Which facets of American society are brought to life within the pages of Quinn’s Book? How do particular characters embody these facets?
5. How does the tragic demise of Hillegond ripple through the lives of others? What were the motivations behind her murder, and how does this event shape the novel’s thematic landscape?
6. What does Lyman Fitzgibbon represent within the narrative? Does his journey reflect the quintessential American Dream, and how plausible is his story?
7. Many characters carve their paths to success within America’s vast landscape. What diverse avenues do they pursue, and are some paths deemed superior? Through these varied journeys, what commentary does Kennedy offer about America?
8. Through the lives of families like the Plums and figures such as Joshua, does Kennedy illustrate the origins of certain modern American challenges?
9. In what ways does Magdalena Colon influence Maud Fallon's life and character? Would Maud's persona be altered had she never encountered Magdalena? What attributes in Magdalena might have bolstered Maud’s resilience?
10. Between Maud and Quinn, who emerges as the more mature figure?
11. Kennedy’s novels frequently intertwine through common characters, familial connections, and historical events. What motivations might drive him to employ this narrative technique?
12. Amidst the gentle pace of Quinn’s Book, how does Kennedy maintain the reader’s engagement and curiosity?
Techniques / Literary Precedents
In the tapestry of a love story between Daniel Quinn and Maud Fallon, the bildungsroman approach intricately weaves their journey from youthful innocence to the seasoned maturity of adulthood. Their saga commences when Quinn is a tender fourteen and Maud a bright-eyed twelve, culminating in their respective ages of twenty-nine and twenty-six. As their paths unfold, Maud's transformation is steeped in the glittering and gritty world of 1840s and 1860s show business, while Quinn's coming-of-age is deeply entwined with the momentous historical events he chronicles as a journalist. Quinn's Book is a proud member of the American literary tradition that chronicles the rites of passage of its youthful protagonists, a legacy that stretches from the likes of Mark Twain's iconic Huckleberry Finn, traverses through Theodore Dreiser's profound An American Tragedy, and extends to the modern musings of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, Winston Groom's whimsical Forrest Gump, and John Irving's contemplative A Prayer for Owen Meany.
The City Novel Tradition
Set against the vibrant backdrop of Albany, New York, Quinn's Book aligns itself with the rich tradition of city novels. This esteemed genre includes Stephen Crane's gritty Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, Theodore Dreiser's poignant Sister Carrie, Sinclair Lewis's incisive Babbitt, John Kennedy Toole's comedic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, Saul Bellow's thought-provoking Mr. Sammler's Planet, and the introspective saga of John Updike's Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom in his quartet of novels. Unlike Crane's and Dreiser's protagonists, who are often overwhelmed by the urban tide, Kennedy's characters, akin to those created by Toole, Bellow, and Updike, discover profound meaning and purpose amidst the bustling energy of city life.
