Review of William Kennedy's "Ironweed"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Though it’s just been a few months since I read this wonderful book, I find myself barely able to remember what actually happened in it. I do remember actually laying in bed at night and crying during several passages, though, and thinking that it was one of the best things that I had read in a long time. The fiction that I’ve been randomly pulling off my shelves has been really good to me this year.

This is part of William Kennedy’s multi-volume Albany Trilogy, which would now be better-named the Albany Cycle. The subject matter didn’t immediately speak to me, and sounded depressing (which it is). A Depression-era man named Francis Phelan lives in Albany, New York who leaves his family in shame after accidentally dropping and killing his infant son, and has decided to live on the streets. The rest of the novel is about meeting characters from his past, both alive and dead. In fact, one of the major themes is summed up by Kennedy in the first extraordinarily beautiful paragraph of the book: 

“Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods. The truck was suddenly surrounded by fields of monuments and cenotaphs of kindred design and striking size, all guarding the privileged dead. But the truck moved on and the limits of mere privilege became visible, for here now came the acres of truly prestigious death: illustrious men and women, captains of life without their diamonds, furs, carriages, and limousines, but buried in pomp and glory, vaulted in great tombs built like heavenly safe deposit boxes, or parts of the Acropolis. And ah yes, here too, inevitably, came the flowing masses, row upon row of them under simple headstones and simpler crosses. Here was the neighborhood of the Phelans.” I was unable to put it down after those few sentences.

The dead have a life uniquely their own, which they sometimes use to haunt the living. In fact, some of the major characters in the novel are dead.

James Atlas has said that “his [Kennedy’s] cycle of Albany novels is one of the great resurrections of place in our literature.” I can’t help but agree. Robert Towers, in the New York Times Book Review, said it’s “a kind of fantasia on the strangeness of human destiny, on the mysterious ways in which a life can be transformed and sometimes redeemed.” Sometimes, despite all the mulling I do over what I read, I simply have to leave it to people who have the words – better words than I have, certainly.