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Overview
The Flaming Corsage opens in a Manhattan hotel room, two women and a man present. Into the room bursts a second man, who transforms the scene into what the tabloids come to call "The Love Nest Killings of 1908." The mystery of that carnage will not come fully unraveled until destiny enwraps the novel's principal and most memorable characters, Katrina Taylor and Edward Daugherty. He is a first-generation Irish American who will break out beyond Albany as a playwright. She is a high-born Protestant, a beautiful and seductive woman with complex attitudes towards life. Theirs is a passionate attachment from the first, simple and unrestrained on Edward's part, more indecisive for Katrina, who, remembering her poet Baudelaire, regards love as apposite to death, "the divine elixir that gives us the heart to follow the endless night." But when the great stalker strikes close to her family in the central event of the novel, a cataclysmic hotel fire, the marriage changes into something else altogether. With virtuosic skill, Kennedy moves The Flaming Corsage back and forward in time from 1884 to 1912, following the fates of Katrina and Edward as other lives impact upon theirs. These others range from their socially opposed families to Katrina's lover, Francis Phelan; Edward's flirtatious actress paramour, Melissa Spencer; the rashly extroverted physician Giles Fitzroy and his wife, Felicity; and Edward's unnerving friend, the cynical journalist Thomas Maginn.The sixth novel in Kennedy's Albany Cycle. In a Manhattan hotel room, a murder-suicide with four protagonists has occurred. But the mystery of who killed whom, and why, in the "Love Nest Killings of 1908," will not come fully unraveled until the lives of the principle characters are fully explored.
Synopsis
The Flaming Corsage opens in a Manhattan hotel room, two women and a man present. Into the room bursts a second man, who transforms the scene into what the tabloids come to call "The Love Nest Killings of 1908." The mystery of that carnage will not come fully unraveled until destiny enwraps the novel's principal and most memorable characters, Katrina Taylor and Edward Daugherty. He is a first-generation Irish American who will break out beyond Albany as a playwright. She is a high-born Protestant, a beautiful and seductive woman with complex attitudes towards life. Theirs is a passionate attachment from the first, simple and unrestrained on Edward's part, more indecisive for Katrina, who, remembering her poet Baudelaire, regards love as apposite to death, "the divine elixir that gives us the heart to follow the endless night." But when the great stalker strikes close to her family in the central event of the novel, a cataclysmic hotel fire, the marriage changes into something else altogether. With virtuosic skill, Kennedy moves The Flaming Corsage back and forward in time from 1884 to 1912, following the fates of Katrina and Edward as other lives impact upon theirs. These others range from their socially opposed families to Katrina's lover, Francis Phelan; Edward's flirtatious actress paramour, Melissa Spencer; the rashly extroverted physician Giles Fitzroy and his wife, Felicity; and Edward's unnerving friend, the cynical journalist Thomas Maginn.
Robert Spillman
The Flaming Corsage, the sixth in Kennedy's ambitious Albany Cycle of novels (which includes Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed), is set in turn-of-the-century Albany, New York, where lower class Irish immigrants carved out space among the long-established British. Edward Dougherty, "some kind of new being with no known habitat," is the son of an Irish foundry worker, but is given an education by Lyman Fitzgibbon, a wealthy landowner whom Edward's father had once saved from an angry rural mob.
Edward, who feels like an alien in both worlds, uses his education to make himself into a writer, first as a reporter, then as a novelist and successful playwright, chronicling his own life and that of laboring Irish immigrants. When he falls in love with Lyman's granddaughter Katrina Taylor, a luminous death-obsessed "modern" woman who devours the poetry of Baudelaire, both families disapprove. The Doughertys think it "traitorous" to marry the daughter of a man who had busted Irish unions, while the Taylors believe that Edward, for all his refinement and education, is far below Katrina's station.
Also working against the couple is Edward's alter-ego, a whoremongering reporter named Maginn who revels in telling his old friend Edward that he will always be "a mudhole mick from the North End." After Edward's social and artistic successes, Maginn jealously conspires to pull him back into the mud. Katrina and Edward marry nevertheless and struggle against the grain of their doomed union.
This is an old story, yet one that really sings, thanks to Kennedy's passionately poetic prose, his precise and judicious use of historical detail, and his steeping the story with the weight of the grim history of the Irish. The characters are sharply drawn and the philosophical questions raised are complex and intriguing. The Flaming Corsage is a powerful, compact and timeless novel by an accomplished artist writing at his best. -- Salon
Editorials
Robert Spillman
The Flaming Corsage, the sixth in Kennedy's ambitious Albany Cycle of novels which includes Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed, is set in turn-of-the-century Albany, New York, where lower class Irish immigrants carved out space among the long-established British. Edward Dougherty, "some kind of new being with no known habitat," is the son of an Irish foundry worker, but is given an education by Lyman Fitzgibbon, a wealthy landowner whom Edward's father had once saved from an angry rural mob.
Edward, who feels like an alien in both worlds, uses his education to make himself into a writer, first as a reporter, then as a novelist and successful playwright, chronicling his own life and that of laboring Irish immigrants. When he falls in love with Lyman's granddaughter Katrina Taylor, a luminous death-obsessed "modern" woman who devours the poetry of Baudelaire, both families disapprove. The Doughertys think it "traitorous" to marry the daughter of a man who had busted Irish unions, while the Taylors believe that Edward, for all his refinement and education, is far below Katrina's station.
Also working against the couple is Edward's alter-ego, a whoremongering reporter named Maginn who revels in telling his old friend Edward that he will always be "a mudhole mick from the North End." After Edward's social and artistic successes, Maginn jealously conspires to pull him back into the mud. Katrina and Edward marry nevertheless and struggle against the grain of their doomed union.
This is an old story, yet one that really sings, thanks to Kennedy's passionately poetic prose, his precise and judicious use of historical detail, and his steeping the story with the weight of the grim history of the Irish. The characters are sharply drawn and the philosophical questions raised are complex and intriguing. The Flaming Corsage is a powerful, compact and timeless novel by an accomplished artist writing at his best. -- Salon
Publishers Weekly -
Enthusiastic readers of Kennedy's Albany Cycle novels, which includes the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed, may be disappointed with this thin tale of love, betrayal and class divisions at the turn of the century. Playwright Edward Daugherty, born to hardscrabble Irish Catholic parents in North Albany, wins the heart of Katrina Taylor, daughter of an established Protestant family whose forebears go back to the founding of the city. Predictably, the marriage is not welcomed by either family, but love wins out. When Edward earns acclaim as a dramatist, he feels emboldened to offer a gaudy attempt at reconciling the family: he buys Katrina's father a racing horse, her mother a fur, and pays for a huge banquet for both families. But all ends in tragedy as fire roars through the dining room, killing one person and injuring Katrina a burning splinter pierces her through her corsage. Edward and Katrina's problems don't end there: Edward falls in love with a young actress, and Katrina, in a promising plot twist that never pays off, has an affair with Francis Phelan, the ill-fated protagonist of Ironweed. By various intrigues, more tragedies occur, most notably the "Love Nest Killings," in which a jealous husband shoots to death his wife and then himself, after wounding Edward in a New York hotel room. Although Kennedy makes an attempt to reflect these goings-on through the prism of Daugherty's plays, the effort smacks not only of a playwright's hopeless desperation to redeem himself but also a novelist's attempt to raise a rather trite novella into a novel of ideas.Library Journal
The Bard of Albany offers a murder mystery with characters from the "Albany" cycle e.g., Very Old Bones, LJ 3/1/92.Kirkus Reviews
"Leave the dead. Let's salvage the tie left to us," the protagonist of Kennedy's latest pleads with his distant, despairing wife. The struggle to escape the past is at the heart of this subtle, wise, original work.This latest installment in Kennedy's ambitious Albany Cycle returns to, and deepens, many of the themes central to the series: the wayward nature of the human heart, the manner in which grief, regret, and enduring need shape and often remake family life, the way in which art, at its best, can clarify and transform life's losses and pain. The sixth in the cycle (previous volumes include Legs, 1975; Ironweed, 1983, which won the Pulitzer Prize; and, most recently, Very Old Bones, 1992) spans the period from the 1880s to 1912. At its center is yet another vibrant, tragic couple: Edward Daugherty, a brilliant playwright, and his equally headstrong, melancholy wife, Katrina. Surrounding them is a cast of other distinct and startling figures: Francis Phelan, Katrina's lover and a hero of Albany's working-class Irish community; the talented, self-destructive journalist Thomas Maginn; and Melissa Spencer, a gifted, conscienceless actress who becomes Daugherty's lover and sets in motion a murder/suicide that comes close to destroying Daugherty. The long, unremitting effort of Albany's Irish population to seize power from the governing elite is never far from the action: Daugherty, given a start in life by a wealthy benefactor, uses his plays to celebrate the resiliency of the Irish and lampoon the Dutch and English who rule the town. That theme, however, never predominates—the long struggle of Edward and Katrina to cope with a series of deaths and betrayals gives the novel its shape and narrative drive.
Filled with precise details of Albany's vanished life, narrated in a prose both salty and exact, catching the vigorous cadence of spoken English, this is the most impressive entry in the Albany Cycle since Ironweed.