Ironweed (1983)

Even after the first two novels in William Kennedy’s series based in Albany, New York—Legs and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game—I wasn’t entirely ready for the plunge into alcoholism that Ironweed delivers. It’s almost certainly the most famous in the series, which spans eight novels published between 1975 and 2012. Kennedy is still alive too, so there could be more, although note he is now 96 years old. Ironweed won a Pulitzer and other awards and ended up on multiple lists of the greatest novels of the 20th century. You may, like me, have heard of it but not known it was part of a series. Kennedy is a very good writer and storyteller—I’m not sure Ironweed is my favorite of the first three, but it’s the least shaggy, a very short but fully packed novel that reaches severe depths as well as heights. It tells the story of the return to Albany after 22 years of Francis Phelan, Billy’s runaway father. He ran because he dropped his third baby, which caused its death. He ran because he had a career as a professional baseball player, a third baseman who could hit and field too. Perhaps most of all he ran because he was and is an alcoholic, a certifiable bum at story’s start and finish. For various reasons stories of profound alcoholism tend to trigger me to contempt and despair. I barely survived the movies Barfly and Leaving Las Vegas, for example. So I struggled with a lot of the events recounted among these down-and-outers and their very hard lives. There’s a beautiful scene where Francis returns home and is welcomed and many wounds healed—and nothing goes wrong. After I finished the book and looked it up on Wikipedia I found it has a structural resemblance to Dante’s Inferno. An opening headnote from that source might have alerted me. I love how Kennedy loves Albany (more than I think I could ever love Albany), with prose that sings across vernaculars, from the argot of gangsters to the poetics of literature. With Dante’s underworld journey supplying its spine, Ironweed becomes a little more pretentious. And yet—it’s one I am more tempted to revisit to trace through its sources more carefully. The novel felt strangely episodic as I read, but now I see there may be larger patterns at play in its background. Lots of meat for such a slender volume.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.
William Kennedy, An Albany Trio