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Overview
The first novel from William Kennedy in more than five years and universally acclaimed as his most powerful work since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed, Roscoe shows Kennedy at his very best. It's V-J Day, the war is over, and Roscoe Conway, after twenty-six years as the second in command of Albany's notorious political machine, decides to quit politics forever. But there's no way out, and only his Machiavellian imagination can help him cope with the erupting disasters. Every step leads back to the past-to the early loss of his true love, the takeover of city hall, the machine's fight with FDR and Al Smith to elect a governor, and the methodical assassination of gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond. "Thick with crime, passion, and backroom banter" (The New Yorker), Roscoe is an odyssey of great scope and linguistic verve, a deadly, comic masterpiece from one of America's most important writers.
Nominated for the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award, Fiction.
Synopsis
The first novel from William Kennedy in more than five years and universally acclaimed as his most powerful work since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed, Roscoe shows Kennedy at his very best. It's V-J Day, the war is over, and Roscoe Conway, after twenty-six years as the second in command of Albany's notorious political machine, decides to quit politics forever. But there's no way out, and only his Machiavellian imagination can help him cope with the erupting disasters. Every step leads back to the past-to the early loss of his true love, the takeover of city hall, the machine's fight with FDR and Al Smith to elect a governor, and the methodical assassination of gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond. "Thick with crime, passion, and backroom banter" (The New Yorker), Roscoe is an odyssey of great scope and linguistic verve, a deadly, comic masterpiece from one of America's most important writers.
New York Times - Janet Maslin
The book, like its hero, displays a wonderful gift of gab as it roams through the ebulliently corrupt byways of Albany.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Returning to New York's capital for the seventh installment in his sweeping Albany Cycle, Pultizer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy (Ironweed) introduces an unlikely hero singing a lonely aria. Roscoe Conway, the man behind the Democratic Party machine, wants a new life beyond bottleggers, bosses, and bagmen. His quest to slough off his past and retire from politics leads to hilarious consequences -- and some first-class storytelling in Roscoe.Janet Maslin
The book, like its hero, displays a wonderful gift of gab as it roams through the ebulliently corrupt byways of Albany.— New York Times
Nashville Tennessean
...a grand, comic, political novel filled with the characters Kennedy knows and describes so well.Detroit Free Press
Episodic but driven by a narrative electricity as alive as postwar America, Roscoe is William Kennedy's finest novel since Ironweed.Columbus Dispatch
Roscoe is a triumph. Packed with precise detail from the world of chronology and fact, it aspires to myth.From The Critics
James Joyce had dublin, Saul Bellow claimed Chicago, William Faulkner distilled the Southern quintessence into his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, and William Kennedy owns Albany, New York. Though such comparisons would appear to put Kennedy at a cultural disadvantage, he somehow approaches Faulkner's mythic dimension, Bellow's comic realism and Joyce's rapturous romance with language. Where literature and Albany are concerned, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.Roscoe is the seventh and most overtly political novel in Kennedy's Albany cycle. Truth be told, this series achieved perfection as a trilogy, capped by 1984's Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed. In retrospect, that novel's popular breakthrough saddled Kennedy with a reputation as a one-hit wonder, an author whose own story (a late bloomer, then in his mid-fifties, whose prizewinner might never have been published without a crucial push from friend Bellow) was as compelling as his novel.
Readers who went backward in the series then discovered the riches of 1975's Legs (whose Legs Diamond and his lawyer return for cameos in Roscoe) and 1978's Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (to this fan, still Kennedy's greatest novel). But those who pressed forward experienced diminishing returns with 1988's Quinn's Book and 1992's Very Old Bones. Though 1996's The Flaming Corsage was hailed as a return to form, upping the ante of critical anticipation, one no longer expects Kennedy to deliver another Ironweed.
Which is good, even liberating, for Roscoe crams so much life and love of literary creation into its pages that those who might carp that it isn'ttightly crafted will be shortchanging the novel's vitality and missing a whole lot of fun. As the author approaches his mid-seventies, he plainly has plenty on his mind and little patience with formalistic convention. If it serves his thematic purposes to have the dead talk—to have his protagonist speak in a vernacular that's as much Shakespearean jester as it is streetwise hustler—and to allow his narrative to swing wildly across the decades and the dictates of memory, so be it. At this point in his career, Kennedy is less concerned with dotting "i"s and crossing "t"s than with letting the reader know how things really work—in Albany, on earth, in heaven.
"Jesus was a nice fellow, but he was a con man," explains Felix Conway, Roscoe's father. "The whole world is fixed against us, the whole damn world is fixed." Though Felix is long dead before the novel begins, his influence permeates the book, determining the course of his son's life and the sensibility that shapes it. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Felix was Albany's first Irish mayor, thrice elected and ultimately ejected from office for fraud. He remained a party fixture, instilling in Roscoe an affinity for backroom politics (along with a preference for maneuvering behind the scenes), encouraging a new generation of schemers to regain what he had lost.
On the surface, Roscoe would seem to be an unlikely hero, but Kennedy takes such delight in his invention that the reader can't help but fall for Roscoe as well. He is "fat but looked only burly," "a figure of Homeric girth" who tellingly decorates his wall with a poster of Shakespeare's Falstaff, only to find himself crucially betrayed by the young Prince Hal he so connivingly serves. Amid the novel's almost incestuous welter of personal, political and romantic entanglements, he represents his brother's murderer, pursues his best friend's wife and marries her sister as a consolation prize. Yet Roscoe stands as a paragon of personal integrity against the fictional Albany's murk of moral ambiguity. He admits to all who ask that everything he says is a lie, which makes him the most honest man in city politics.
When a girlfriend who can't control her seductive impulses seeks absolution, Roscoe replies, "Would I get angry if my rabbit carnalized another rabbit? Fornication is God's fault, not yours." Practically every female in the book is depicted as a wanton temptress (the best is merely a borderline gold digger), because that's how the men perceive them. As for those men, their sense of brotherhood takes its cues from Cain and Abel.
Whether exploring the political machinery behind decades of campaigns or explaining the chicanery of cockfighting (described as a kindred sport to politics), Kennedy remains more concerned with the metaphysics of truth than with winners and losers. In philosophy as well as politics, he shows scant regard for the sort of idealists ("goo-goos," in his dismissive parlance) who set their sights on the way things should be rather than the way things are.
The ultimate truth? "The turf below, the sky above, are true," Roscoe muses. "It's true only if you can't fix it. Everybody in the cemetery is true."
—Don McLeese