William Kennedy has always demanded as much from fiction as it can spare. Over the course of seven novels, he has displayed a high-wire allegiance to language. His energies are directed at an ongoing harmony, the balance of imaginative riches and pure form. The range of his affection is great. The moral centre of his work is that stories matter and that, as a consequence, our lives matter. We survive not by our ability to forget but by our ability to remember. We are all at risk, suggests Kennedy, and he and he wouldn't want it any other way. Colum McCann reviews.
Kennedy began writing stories 50 years ago. It is instructive to think that, at the time, William Faulkner had recently delivered his Nobel Prize address, saying that the duty of the writer was to confront "the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths, lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice". It certainly takes a brave writer to attempt to come to terms with such a large and dangerous canvas. But I daresay that William Kennedy is one of the few who has managed to do it.
Roscoe is the seventh novel in Kennedy's Albany cycle. He didn't set out to create a cycle when he first wrote Legs in 1975, but the novels began to weave and interweave until they became an intricate history and examination of American culture and identity. Nowadays, Kennedy says that the novels are an "open-ended set of non-sequential tales".
Roscoe begins at the end of the second World War as the girls in the bars are due to become "soldier-sailor sandwiches". Roscoe Conway - "a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory" - is thinking of quitting politics for the quieter art of middle age and contemplation. But life and all its vagaries won't let go of him. Just as he is about to retire, a good friend of his commits suicide. Roscoe, in love with the dead man's widow, finds himself drawn into the 1945 election, a paternity suit, a brace of feuding brothers and a widening spiral of memory and desire.
Roscoe is, on its immediate surface, a book about politics. Roscoe Conway - overweight, lovelorn, beset by ulcers - is a man at the centre of the corrupt Democratic machine in upstate New York. A man of innate honesty, he knows that "it's a short walk from politics to hell". His failing is that politics is his whole life, and he cannot escape it - or the dishonesty. So he is caught up in a world of henchmen, whores, hotel sneaks and hoodlums. And the truth is that he loves every whiff of it.
Roscoe is large in every sense of the word: verbally exuberant and imaginatively hyperactive. At 55 years of age, his libido still clouds his good sense. His openness - as opposed to the closed shop of many contemporary literary figures - gets him into an array of monumental difficulties.
Kennedy is the master of the literary set-piece. There are moments in the novel that simply demand the sort of silence you only get by closing the covers and taking a deep breath: a cock-fight becomes a lesson in blood and brotherhood; a child dies of complications from appendicitis; a whore stabs her pimp and after wiping off the blood she sits down to eat Swiss cheese and saltine crackers; an aging Roscoe and his childhood sweetheart learn "the sweetest of pressures" as they make love.
The novel ends up being a love story, albeit a love that can't outlast the brute realities of politics. Ultimately, Kennedy believes in redemption. The world is a place of beauty - all you have to do is crawl down into the gutters to see this.
To coincide with the publication of Roscoe, Kennedy's publishers have decided to publish the other six novels in the Albany Cycle (two volumes, £10.99 sterling each). While it is tempting to say that Roscoe might be the best of the seven, the fact of the matter is that each of the novels (as Roscoe himself would say) forks the lightening in its own peculiar way.
Kennedy is, in many ways, a photographer, or a cinematographer: he is a writer who captures time, transforms it, then guides it forward into the present for his readers to consume. He steps into the lost moments of the past and makes history real. There is a huge amount of research done in his work, but he hides by forgetting it and allowing it to seep through language: you can feel the jazz bucking up from the needle. He invents out of a confluence of known facts and fancies plucked from his imagination. "Truth is in the details," says Roscoe, "even if you invent the details."
This is hardly a radical notion in American literature, but Kennedy (along with E.L Doctorow, Hemingway and Don deLillo) is one of the few writers who can comfortably straddle the double helix of fact and story. Kennedy is probably one of those writers who quite rightly doubts the use of the word "fiction" - the characters he creates are surely more real to him, and to us, than the six billion people in this world he has not met.
The fact that Scribner has released all seven books together (and managed to keep the cost of the Albany Cycle reasonable) is to be applauded. It will give readers a chance to drown themselves in Kennedy for a couple of months, to watch how the novels have shifted and changed, and to come to terms with some of his larger themes. In the Albany Cycle, the books don't come in the order they were written - rather they are arranged chronologically. We begin with Billy Phelan's Greatest Game and end with the masterful Legs. Albany is Kennedy's Yoknapatawpha county, a city where everyone knows everyone else. Familiar characters pop up in different books, like old friends or ghosts. The books unfold in gradations and tend to point towards the end of a natural arc without ever reaching an endgame.
Kennedy allows mystery to occur. And he adores this mystery as much as he adores his city of Albany.
IN Ironweed, Francis Phelan - despite the fact that he is soaked in gin and bitterness - is a great moral character. He is haunted by what he has lost in his life, not least the fact that his son died when he dropped him. Francis goes on a literary journey; like a 20th-century Dante, he attempts to get out of hell in order to spend some time in purgatory. He never gives up. His strong morality is that he recognises his baseness. There is a great catharsis in allowing your story to be told. This is one of Kennedy's main themes: we must tell our stories or die useless.
This is also where Kennedy's "Irishness" comes into play. There are many facets of Kennedy's writing that could be termed Irish - the risk-taking with language, the high-wire act between sentimentality and brutality, the Joycean attention to urban detail, the prodigal narrative voice, the thin meniscus between life and death; the dark humour where Kennedy seems to have thrust his hand into Flann O'Brien's heart and run off with it, still thumping, in his hands to make it something new and American.
There is no doubt that Kennedy is aware that the Irish marrow is deep in his bones - the books (particularly Quinn's Book) go comfortably to the west of Ireland. Nearly all his great characters have an Irish-Catholic background; and even the rhythm of speech seems to hold memory of water and grass. Kennedy's is a Celtic voice - there are echoes of Ben Kiely here, John Montague, Dylan Thomas and, of course, Joyce himself.
We should be so lucky as to be able to claim him as an Irish writer. The fact is that Kennedy is not diseased by any notion of national consciousness. He says in his non-fiction book O Albany! that his Irishness "was the only element in my history that wasn't organised, the only one I couldn't resign from and, further, the only one that hadn't been shoved down my throat".
For him, it is a happy accident. His allegiance is to the country of literature. In this landscape, he happens to be one of its bravest explorers. While a lot of contemporary literature is dull, beaten-down and housebroken, Kennedy goes for the big emotion and the major gesture. He gets himself in trouble sometimes - his penchant for phantoms and ghosts is often where he drops off the high-wire - but he manages always to spin around and continue his act.
What this boils down to is something seldom discussed by critics and even other writers: bravery. Kennedy is a literary gambler, a crapshooter, a cardshark. A word has the weight of a stone in his hands. A vowel has colour. A sentence stays up in the air way longer than it should - in fact it stays up so long that it begins to succeed.
HE takes extraordinary narrative risks - The Flaming Corsage, for instance, is a vast amalgam of techniques and styles, all bumping up against one another in a manner that would have made John DosPassos turn in his grave. In Kennedy's world, life doesn't respect logic and grammar, so why should language? He gambles by leaving whole sections of lives untouched - his narrative is then completed by suggestion and (like any good wordsmith) his stories are never fully complete until taken up by the reader.
His thematic concerns are intimate and brave. For all the filth and back-stabbing of Albany and its citizens, Kennedy believes in redemption and immortality. Our lives matter. Nothing good will ever be achieved through predictability. We should dare to live greatly. By necessity, the darkness has light, and equally the light is dimmed with a sort of darkness.
In Kennedy's hands, even the most tired soul can wail for freedom: the fact that he has emotional access to such a range of characters is quite stunning. And Kennedy believes in beauty and laughter and sex - not bad attributes for the world we live in, or even the world we might choose to escape.
Kennedy is one of the hardest-working writers around - it's not easy to achieve the ease and flow he displays in his books. But in another sense, Kennedy seems to write by the seat of his pants. He certainly does not make a roadmap for his stories - his characters bring him unusual places, and it is obvious that the joy he gets from writing is what he discovers en route.
In other words - contrary to the lesson of writing workshops and university courses - William Kennedy does not write about what he knows about. He searches out that which he doesn't know - and then learns it intimately. This is why, at the age of 75, he continues to become a better writer. This in itself is no small feat, for every writer knows the terror of growing older and wondering if the gift is fading, or faded, or altogether lost.
With the publication of Roscoe, it is good to report that the Albany Cycle has not ended here, but that the circle, in terms of literary history, is already held.
As Roscoe himself suggests at the end of his novel: love or death, it doesn't matter, either way he's going to get a little music.
Roscoe. By William Kennedy. Scribner. 376 pp. £15.99 sterling
The Albany Cycle: Book One and The Albany Cycle: Book 2 by William Kennedy are published by Scribner: £10.99 sterling
Colum McCann's forthcoming novel, Dancer, will be published in January