The fourth novel in William Kennedy’s Albany cycle is fairly called a doozy. The opening scene, which describes a natural disaster, is insanely vivid and the tale at hand proceeds from there, with drowning victims recovered and a resurrection scene so over the top all you can really do is laugh. Daniel Quinn is there as a young teenager and he saves Maud Fallon, equally young, from drowning. She begs him to steal her away from her guardian, a sex worker and stage performer and her aunt with her own oddball retinue in tow. The rest of the novel never quite lives up to this amazing opening, but the glow lasts all the way. The incident takes place in 1849 and we stay with this motley group for about a year, before the novel shifts into the wartime future of 1864, with a brief stop in 1858, mostly in flashback. I was 100% on the side of Quinn and Maud but alas things don’t always go the way you’d like or expect. Some tantalizing details, such as a mysterious shiny disc recovered from its concealment at the bottom of a birdcage, never seem to amount to anything. Maybe this disc appears elsewhere and is explained in the cycle? For that matter, as familiar as the name Quinn is from the first three novels (
Legs,
Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, and
Ironweed) I don’t remember the circumstances and couldn’t find anything on the internet about him.
Ironweed won all the awards and attention for Kennedy and his Albany cycle of novels, but I liked
Legs more and
Quinn’s Book might be even better. Kennedy is one of those writers who loves language and writing and his own voice, so he tends to be a pleasure to read no matter what. He’s even making up words my kindle dictionary doesn’t know, though their meanings are always plain from context. In many ways this feels like what you’d get if J.D. Salinger wrote
Blood Meridian. I love the 19th-century setting—including, of course, as it must, the Civil War—even though the sensibility driving it is thoroughly late 20th century. I was worried for Fenimore Cooper’s stultifying voice, given his tales could well have taken place in upstate New York. But
Quinn’s Book is way better than any Cooper I know. My advice, if you like Kennedy, is don’t stop with
Ironweed.
In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.
