In the latest novel in his Albany Cycle, Pulitzer Prize-winner William Kennedy (Ironweed) tells the somewhat convoluted story of Daniel Quinn, an Albany journalist trying to fill the large shoes of his historian grandfather and numbers-running father. The story begins with Quinn hanging out in Havana in the 1950s, vying for an interview with the rebel Castro.
Havana in the '50s is a wild, musical place--a hodge-podge of gamblers, whores, politicians, soldiers, revolutionaries, gangsters and wealthy sugar plantation owners. Quinn runs into Hemingway drinking rum at the infamous El Floridita. Papa introduces Quinn to the hot and beautiful Renata--20 years Quinn's junior and a rebel sympathizer. Their conversation follows in the stilted declarative shortcuts of Hemingway prose, even as the writer's advice pours out: "Keep [exaggerating] and soon you'll have a novel... remove the colon and semicolon keys from your typewriter... shun adverbs, strenuously." Rarely does a serious novel get an opportunity like this to make fun of all the Hemingway writing clichés.
Eventually Quinn marries Renata and takes her back to Albany. Kennedy then jumps to 1968, the year of Bobby Kennedy's killing, when New York's racially divided capital city has become a battleground. Through the words of the brilliant character of Quinn's father, the dementia-addled George, Kennedy is able to bring to life the history of the city, against which the plot takes on the heat of local revolution. Ultimately a homeless black man with a gun and a defrocked radical priest band together to prevent a riot, "the pair of them on an odyssey of Franciscan politics and leftover jazz."
With such a broad range of characters and a story crossing 20 years of social struggle in two countries, Kennedy works to tie all the loose ends together. That he largely succeeds is perhaps the result of all his years of journalism and fiction--years spent practicing many of the very same Hemingway precepts that he ironically mimics in the first chapters. –-Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kans.