After asking you to nominate books you felt were underappreciated, Ironweed by William Kennedy has come out of the hat to be our Reading Group book for April.
A year after it was published in 1983, Ironweed won the Pulitzer prize for fiction and was even made into a film starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, in 1987. But I think it’s reasonable to say that deserves a little more attention today. I have to admit to near total ignorance of the novel. It has barely been mentioned in the Guardian’s book pages in the last five years, and it has yet to appear on the excellent Backlisted Podcast.
More to the point, Ironweed also sounds like one heck of a book. Described by the Washington Post as “a lyric work of fiction about the life of a bum” and “beautifully sorrowful”, the novel follows Francis Phelan, the aforementioned bum as he returns to his hometown of Albany, New York, haunted by past crimes, an alcoholic past and ongoing hallucinations.
When the book was released, Saul Bellow declared it “distinguished”, while the Guardian praised its “dark lyricism”. The usually straight-faced Kirkus Reviews went positively Neal Cassady over it, excitedly declaring that Kennedy’s prose “curlicues in extravagant declamations, levitates into hellfire profanations, and celebrates the bonding of an underculture’s fine, boozy chivalry – like those pre-stupor moments in a Saturday-night bar when the consciousness peers into poetry and the cosmos”.
But my favourite contemporary review of the book came in the New York Times, where George Stade outlined why he hated “lyrical novelists” and just about everything he assumed Kennedy stood for – before actually reading the book and realising he loved it. How’s this for an inducement to read?
In spite of my prejudices, for the last few weeks Mr. Kennedy’s Irish stews, crooks, roughnecks, cons, gamblers, bums, pols and working stiffs have been moving around in my head, setting examples, giving good advice. His tough-minded and defiant humanism has left me chastened but feeling good. My guess is that it will have the same effect on many readers.
I’m in! I hope you’ll join me. Just in case you need more inducement, here’s an excellent primer on the long and impressive career of William Kennedy, written by Emma Brockes in the Guardian in 2012. We’re just chasing five copies for lucky readers – keep an eye out in the comments for that.
