conjure a narrative structure that adds mystery and tension to the exuberant melodrama.Roscoe, a novel of city hall politics, works in much the same way, except with the added elements of dark horror and comedy. In these books, Kennedy is at his most lyrical and honest, and he has his essential instruments of novel-writing sharp and ready. Kennedy’s rich voice, particularly his crisp dialogue, allows him simultaneously to celebrate and ridicule rascals such as Roscoe Conway.

Without question, the most prevailing and distinguishing feature of Kennedy’s work is its strong sense of time and place. Throughout the years, Albany has suffered the fate of existing in the shadow of its more cosmopolitan neighbor, New York City. By comparison, Albany gained a reputation as a singularly unromantic, provincial city. Kennedy embraces this unlikely setting; peoples it with old, sick, poor, and degenerate characters; and out of it all manages to spin magical tales, full of feeling and importance.

Kennedy’s fiction focuses on the down-and-out—people in extreme situations, pushed to their limits, with their souls laid bare. The setting itself—Albany, in all its sordid splendor—acts as a character, a visible force shaping the lives of those who call the city home. In all of his novels, Kennedy treats his characters and their home with reverence and respect, never satirizing, sentimentalizing, or apologizing for their shortcomings.

In his raucous New York town, Kennedy creates a microcosm and paints a vivid picture of all that was wicked and corrupt and splendid in America’s not-so-distant past. Writing with an undeniable knowledge of the people, the idioms, and the history of his hometown, Kennedy creates an Albany alive with mythic possibilities and lavishes enthusiastic attention on those generally neglected by others. Kennedy’s work hails Albany as a durable town held up by a cast of resilient characters whose main concern, and talent, is survival. With a witty, ironic style, Kennedy blends nostalgia with serious history to create believable fiction. As Bellow commented upon the publication of Ironweed: “These Albany novels will be memorable, a distinguished group of books.”

Legs

First published: 1975

Type of work: Novel

A devoted friend and lawyer recounts the escapades of his boss, legendary gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond.

In Legs, Kennedy creates a fictional biography recounting the last year and a half of the life of Albany’s most notorious gangster. Jack “Legs” Diamond—a real-life bootlegger, murderer, drug dealer, and rascal—lived above the law, carrying out his business in upstate New York during Prohibition in the 1920’s and early 1930’s. Kennedy’s fictional account of this legendary figure was five years in the making, the result of painstaking historical research and eight drafts. Legs is, however, more than a catalog of one gangster’s exploits. It is a psychological and sociological look at America’s fascination with gangsters, murderers, and criminals of all types. Jack, like many gangsters of his era, was a celebrity, a national obsession. The newspapers were filled with details of his every move. He received fan mail, and cheers filled the courtroom when he was acquitted of one particularly brutal assault.

Legs is narrated by Marcus Gorman, Jack’s employee, friend, and admirer. The two first meet in the Catskills in 1925 when Marcus impresses Jack with his eloquent praise of Al Jolson, one of Jack’s favorite musicians. Later, Jack sends Marcus, an ambitious young lawyer, six quarts of Scotch in exchange for a pistol permit from Albany County. Attracted to the excitement and intrigue that surrounds this Irish American gangster-bootlegger, Marcus becomes Jack’s personal lawyer in 1930. While acknowledging the violence and crime, Marcus nevertheless idolizes his boss and recounts their days together with heartfelt admiration and devotion. Marcus declares that Jack was, above all, a man of integrity and deserves at least some credit for being an honest thief.

Working out of his headquarters in the Catskills, Jack made his money running liquor across the border from Canada during the days of Prohibition. His operation was huge and elaborate, with flocks of carrier pigeons used as messengers to avoid telephone wiretaps. Jack came to upstate New York after leaving New York City, where he had shot a customer at his nightclub—once in the stomach, once in the forehead, twice in the temple, and twice in the groin—then hit the man’s brother over the head with the spent revolver. Marcus tells the details of several other of Jack’s gruesome deeds. Once upstate, Jack tried to hang a local farmer, then did away with a competing rum-runner by dismembering him and burning his body in a still. Wherever Jack went, he left a trail of crime. He killed and tortured, dealt in liquor and heroin, and betrayed his associates. He bought judges, politicians, and policemen, and to many he seemed unstoppable. His body was filled with bullets and crossed with scars that his mistresses traced with their fingers. He was a ladies’ man who frequented whorehouses while his devoted wife, Alice, remained faithful to him to the end.

In 1931, Jack’s empire began to crumble. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then governor of New York, brought a fourteen-count indictment against him. The new federal crowd seemed unbuyable, and in a raid on his headquarters in the Catskills, seized ten million dollars in warehouse stock. Later that year, Jack, wearing only his underwear, was gunned down in a rooming house.

Kennedy writes with wit and energy as he brings to light the moral ambiguity of success. With vivid language, Marcus’s powerful narrative evokes a strong sense of time and place and tells an engrossing story of violence, sex, love, and comedy. In Marcus’s mind, Jack never really died. He, in many ways, personifies the American Dream. He embodies the rags-to-riches story, rising to the top by shooting his way to fame. More important, as Marcus sees it, Jack “Legs” Diamond is a prototype for modern urban gangsters and lives on as one of the founding fathers of criminality, whose legacy is sure to be felt for years to come. As Marcus says in his tribute to one of Albany’s most memorable bullies, “Why he was a pioneer, the founder of the first truly modern gang, the dauphin of the town for years.”

Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game

First published: 1978

Type of work: Novel

An Albany newspaper columnist recounts the story of Billy Phelan, a small-time hustler who finds himself in the middle of a kidnapping and extortion plot.

Like Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game tells a story of Albany’s seamier side, based on an actual incident from the city’s history. In this second novel of what is often called the “Albany cycle,” Kennedy fashions his work of fiction around the real-life 1933 kidnapping of John O’Connell, Jr., the nephew of Mayor Dan O’Connell and the heir apparent to Albany’s omnipotent Democratic machine. In Kennedy’s novel, the year is moved forward to 1938, the O’Connells become the McCalls, and John, Jr., is known as Charlie Boy. Caught in the middle, torn between lending his services to the kidnappers or to the politicians, is Billy Phelan. Billy is a thirty-one-year-old pool hustler, bowling ace, poker player, and bookie who feels at home in the tough streets of this Depression-era town.

Along with its other similarities to Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game shares a similar narrative structure. Billy’s story is told by Martin Daugherty, a world-weary columnist from Albany’s Times-Union (the newspaper Kennedy worked for before becoming a full-time fiction writer). Like Marcus Gorman in Legs, Daugherty acts as foil to the protagonist. Daugherty is a fifty-year-old husband and father, a man burdened with responsibility. With sympathy and understanding, he tells the story of Billy Phelan, a tough, street-smart young man of hardy Irish stock, and like Legs’s Martin Gorman, he looks on the shady adventures of his subject with a certain degree of envy. As a reporter, Daugherty has seen too much of the world, and with the eye of a cynic, he looks with disgust at the political corruption that has become a way of life in his town.

The action of the story centers on the bizarre kidnapping of the political boss’s nephew. Billy, who is a small cog in the McCall machine, gets pulled in as reluctant go-between. He is pushed to turn informer and must decide whether to uphold his underworld image or comply with the demands of his political patrons by informing on the kidnappers.

Typical of Kennedy’s style, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game is narrated in vivid, fast-paced cinematic prose that mirrors the swift, suspenseful action of the rough and sweaty city his characters call home. The shabby but ever-resourceful underworld figures move at night, hiding in the shadows, occasionally illuminated by the glow of neon signs. They inhabit the rough world of the Irish working class, where being a survivor is all that counts.

Like Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game enjoyed a respectable number of favorable reviews but failed to achieve wide critical recognition or commercial success. Prominent critic Doris Grumbach commented in a 1978 article for the SaturdayReview: “[Kennedy’s] pitch is perfect. . . . The cast of Billy Phelan is, quite simply, a wonder—a magical bunch of thugs, lovers, and game players. No one writing in America today . . . has Kennedy’s rich and fertile gift of gab; his pure verbal energy; his love of people, and their kith and kin.”

Ironweed

First published: 1983

Type of work: Novel

Francis Phelan, haunted by ghosts from his past, returns home after twenty-two years of life on the run.

With the publication of Ironweed in 1983, Kennedy suddenly found himself at the forefront of contemporary American fiction. This third novel of Kennedy’s Albany cycle received wide critical acclaim, winning both the National Book Critics Circle Award (1983-1984) and the Pulitzer Prize (1984). Ironically, Ironweed was initially rejected by thirteen publishing houses. Because of the commercial failings of Legs and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, the editors at Viking were reluctant to undertake the publication of another Kennedy novel. A scolding letter from novelist Bellow, however, Kennedy’s first fiction writing teacher, changed their minds and gave Viking the idea of reissuing Kennedy’s two previous novels and marketing the trilogy as what Bellow called the Albany cycle. In his letter, Bellow reprimanded the editors at Viking, saying, “That the author of Billy Phelan should have a manuscript kicking around looking for a publisher is disgraceful.”

In Ironweed, Kennedy continues his story of the fictional Phelan family and focuses his narrative on Billy’s father, Francis. Among other ties to the previous Albany novels is the brief appearance of Marcus Gorman, the narrator of Legs; he serves as Francis’s lawyer in Ironweed. In Kennedy’s Albany cycle, the cast of characters usually overlaps slightly from one book to another. While the reappearances and intertwining plots are interesting to note, each novel in the Albany cycle is self-contained and ultimately stands on its own, independent of its predecessors.

In both Legs and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, the narrators themselves develop into main characters and supply important secondary plots. lronweed, however, is told from a third-person instead of a first-person point of view, and the character of narrator is thus eliminated. Ironweed is the story of one man’s physical and emotional struggle for survival and redemption. All the narrative energy and insight is focused on this one main character, Francis Phelan.

A man haunted by his past, Francis has been wandering from flophouse to flophouse after walking out on his family twenty-two years ago. The novel spans two days and two nights, Halloween and All Saints’ Day in 1938. Francis has returned to his hometown of Albany, lured by the city’s election and a crooked politician’s offer of five dollars per vote. Eager to make some easy money, Francis has voted twenty-one times. Caught in the act, he is now spending his Halloween digging graves in a local cemetery to pay his legal expenses.

A former major-league third baseman, Francis had abandoned his wife and two children after the tragic death of his thirteen-day-old son. Francis accidentally dropped the infant while changing his diapers and now bears the grim responsibility of his own son’s death. His newborn son was not the only person to die at Francis’s hands. In a trolley-workers’ strike, he killed a scab with a blow from a well-tossed rock; over the years, Francis has been witness to more than two dozen other deaths.

The opening scene of Ironweed finds Francis in an Albany graveyard, face-to-face with the ghosts of these and other victims of his past violence and neglect. In this fictional world where the line between fantasy and reality is obscured, the dead are very much alive, watching with great interest those they left behind. As Francis rides into the cemetery, his mother fidgets in her grave while his father, amused by his wife’s nervousness, smokes a pipe and reflects on how much his son has changed. With an elegiac tone and at times surrealistic style, Kennedy is able to make these strange grumblings from the dead seem natural, even believable.

Francis lives on the streets and inhabits a dirty world of depressed and diseased winos. He moves from flophouses to missions to hobo jungles with a frail woman named Helen, his companion in homelessness. Shifting from past to present, reality to illusion, Kennedy vividly creates this haunted world of the bums where Francis seeks refuge from his disturbing past.

In one of the book’s most moving scenes, the fifty-eight-year-old Francis returns home to his family with a turkey under his arm for dinner. Reunited with his faithful wife, Francis is shocked to learn that she has never blamed him for their son’s death, never even told anyone that it was Francis who dropped the baby. In a departure from the fast-paced journalistic style of his previous novels, Kennedy uses poetic prose, compassionate yet unsentimental, to show a man coming to terms with his own sense of guilt.

A passage from The Audubon Society’s Field Guide to North American Wildflowers serves as an epigraph for the book and explains that ironweed is a common flowering weed with a particularly tough stem. Indeed, Francis is resilient like the ironweed of the title. He is a survivor, an unromantic antihero caught in a seemingly never-ending quest for forgiveness from both the dead and the living.

Quinn’s Book

First published: 1988

Type of work: Novel

Daniel Quinn comes of age as a writer and as a lover in nineteenth century Albany.

Many critics have argued that Quinn’s Book should not be considered a part of Kennedy’s Albany cycle. In both style and setting, Quinn’s Book stands apart from Kennedy’s previous works. Though set in Albany, Quinn’s Book shows New York’s capital city as it was in the nineteenth century and marks a break from Kennedy’s previous preoccupation with twentieth century Albany. The style of writing also looks back to an earlier time, often imitating the melodramatic, convoluted rhetoric typical of nineteenth century prose.

Quinn’s Book is a fictional autobiography narrated by Daniel Quinn, who at the start of the book is a fourteen-year-old skiffman on the Hudson River. The book opens on a cataclysmic day in Albany in 1849. A boat crossing the Hudson capsizes after being struck by an ice floe. The legendary actress-courtesan Magdalena Colon, better known as La Ultima, is one of the ill-fated passengers thrown overboard to her death. Her body is heroically pulled from the icy waters by young Daniel’s boss, John the Brawn. Daniel, on a rescue mission of his own, assists La Ultima’s bewitching twelve-year-old niece, Maud Fallon, to safety. Meanwhile, a nearby bridge collapses and more than a hundred onlookers plunge into the frozen Hudson. Calamities continue as the rush of ice causes a tidal wave that, in turn, starts a fire raging through the city. Amid the chaos, young Daniel, Maud, and John seek refuge and rush La Ultima’s body to the grand mansion of one of Albany’s oldest Dutch families. Here, in a frenzy of necrophilia, John resuscitates La Ultima through rigorous intercourse as Daniel and Maud look on with great fascination.

With this apocalyptic start, the novel is set in motion. Daniel reminisces, with great energy, about this important life-changing day, the day he met and fell in love with the beautiful Maud. The rest of the novel tells of Daniel’s fifteen-year artistic and romantic quest as he struggles to become a writer and to forge a union with the elusive and, at times, infuriating Maud. This fictional coming-of-age story takes place against a busy historical backdrop. As a journalist, Daniel is particularly aware of events going on around him, and much of his narrative is devoted to firsthand accounts of these historic moments. The Civil War rages on while the Underground Railroad leads escaped slaves to freedom. Closer to home, unrest grows among local iron-foundry workers, and the New York draft riots break out in 1864. True to the detail and language of the period, all of these events, complete with races at Saratoga and spectacular theatrical productions, take place alongside Daniel’s raucous odyssey. History and fiction are interwoven with authentic rhetorical gusto, using a rich variety of nineteenth century literary styles, ranging from bombastic melodrama to comic sportswriting. With originality and humor, this picaresque novel blends fact and fiction to create a panoramic view of Albany’s colorful history.

The Flaming Corsage

First published: 1996

Type of work: Novel

Playwright Edward Daugherty and his wife, Katrina, are at the center of this story of love, betrayal, and class division.

The Flaming Corsage begins with the “Love Nest Killings of 1908.” A cuckolded husband enters a Manhattan hotel suite; shoots his wife through the heart, killing her; fires two shots at Edward Daugherty, the novel’s protagonist, hitting him with one; sends Daugherty’s mistress scampering into the bedroom to hide; and kills himself by putting the revolver under his chin and pulling the trigger. Our initial reaction is that William Kennedy has left Albany behind and opted instead to tell a story that takes place in the more famous neighboring city to the south. After this brief and explosive opening, though, the novel moves backward in time to September, 1885, and readers have returned to Kennedy’s Albany.

Kennedy then introduces Edward Daugherty and Katrina Taylor, characters who should be familiar to enthusiastic readers of the Albany cycle. Edward, born to working-class Irish Catholic parents from North Albany, pursues and wins the hand of Katrina, the daughter of wealthy English-Dutch Episcopalians who are part of Albany’s ruling class. The class difference proves to be problematic, as both Katrina’s and Edward’s families reject their relationship. Eventually, though, Edward and Katrina are married, much to the chagrin of their parents, and their passionate and turbulent marriage is at the center of the novel.

Edward wins popularity as a playwright and sets out to heal the rift between the Daugherty and Taylor families. Eight years into his marriage, he hosts a dinner party at the Delavan House Hotel that brings the feuding families together. As a sort of peace offering, he presents Mr. Taylor with the ownership papers for a racehorse named Gallant Warrior, and he gives Mrs. Taylor a fur coat. Unexpectedly, though, the dinner party is interrupted when the maître d’ calmly announces that the hotel is on fire. A mad rush to get out of the place ensues, and the evening ends in tragedy. Eventually, the fire takes the lives of Katrina’s father and sister, and Katrina herself is seriously injured, as her breast is pierced by a flaming splinter following a dramatic elevator collapse that sends flames and embers shooting into the billiard room where the families are trapped. It is this defining moment that gives the novel its title, as the splinter cuts through Katrina’s corsage of violets, causing the corsage and her gown to go up in flames. From there, things gets worse. Katrina recovers, and she has an affair with young Francis Phelan, the protagonist of Ironweed. Edward also takes a mistress, a young actress, and these events, mixed with a variety of other tragic happenings, send readers hurtling headlong toward the Manhattan hotel suite in 1908 where Edward is shot and wounded.

The novel spans twenty-eight years, and Kennedy brilliantly fills in blank spaces from his previous stories, completing his dark and theatrical vision of Albany and the public and private histories of generations upon generations of its inhabitants. Most impressive, The Flaming Corsage is a successful marriage of Kennedy’s early and middle-era styles mixed with more mature elements. The four-year hiatus between Very Old Bones and The Flaming Corsage seemed to serve him well. Here, Kennedy gives his readers a book that is part-Ironweed, part-Quinn’s Book, part prose poem, and part theatrical tragedy. Katrina Taylor Daugherty is certainly one of his finest inventions, and his mastery of the art of novel-writing is evidenced by his ability to shift back and forth in time in the mode of William Faulkner without sacrificing the soul of the story.

Roscoe

First published: 2002

Type of work: Novel

Roscoe Conway, a Democratic Party boss in Albany after World War II, wants to retire from politics, but his old life will not let go of him.

William Kennedy’s seventh novel of the Albany cycle, Roscoe is the story of Roscoe Conway, the boisterous, engaging, and rogue politician who has made the Democratic Party what it is in 1930’s and 1940’s Albany. The book begins in 1945, as Roscoe has decided, finally, to retire from politics. A series of barriers, however, stand in the way, and the retirement has to be delayed.

Things fall apart when Roscoe’s best friend, steel magnate Elisha Fitzgibbon, commits suicide, and his former wife, the sister of Elisha’s widow, returns to add mayhem to an already volatile situation. Meanwhile, Roscoe is working to get Alex Fitzgibbon, Elisha’s son, back into the office of mayor. He is also attempting to patch up a feud between Democratic leader Patsy McCall and his brothers, characters who previously appeared in Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game. On top of this, Roscoe is also trying to heal the divide between McCall stooge Mac McEvoy and Roscoe’s brother O.B., Albany’s chief of police, over credit for the killing of Jack “Legs” Diamond.

Another element that adds confusion and chaos to Roscoe’s life is his longtime love for Elisha’s widow, Veronica. Now that Elisha is dead, Roscoe finally works up the courage to make a move on Veronica, and he is very close to winning her heart. As if that were not enough, Roscoe also receives visitations from his dead father, Felix, and the reader is reminded how commonplace it is for the living to communicate with the dead in Kennedy’s Albany.

In some ways, Roscoe is the book that Kennedy has always needed and wanted to write. It is an investigation into the nature of a certain kind of politician, the kind that seemingly no longer exists. Hot-blooded Roscoe bears much in common with legendary politicians of old such as Jimmy Walker and Fiorello La Guardia, and he injects vibrancy and comic energy into Kennedy’s otherwise dark vision of the post-World War II Albany political machine. More than that, though, the novel is about Roscoe’s Irishness and about the archetypal Irish American Democrat of the first half of the twentieth century. Whether one reads Roscoe as historical fiction, as a tale about power in the vein of William Shakespeare’s Henry IV (c. 1597-1598), or as a simple legal thriller, Roscoe is a successful contribution to the Albany cycle, one that cements Kennedy’s place among America’s greatest literary regionalists and also helps shed light on a time when politicians were as flawed and crooked as ever, yet full of a vivacity and originality that has all but disappeared from the American political landscape.

In interviews, Kennedy has stressed the importance to him of writing about past events instead of current events in the interest of avoiding the trap of writing mere journalism. With Roscoe, the reader sees why this formula works for Kennedy. He allows himself enough distance, enough freedom, to mold and shape these characters into unique and spirited creations. An exposé on a recent or current political figure would surely backfire for precisely all the reasons that Roscoe works so well.