New Hibernia Review

New Hibernia Review 6.2 (2002) 156-157

Book Review

Reading William Kennedy

Reading William Kennedy, by Michael Patrick Gillespie, pp. 198. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002. $17.95 (paper); $39.95 (cloth).

In Reading William Kennedy, Michael Patrick Gillespie adds to a small but growing body of literary criticism of contemporary novelist William Kennedy, the Albany-born writer made famous by his 1983 novel, Ironweed, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Kennedy's place in contemporary American fiction has been most firmly established by his "Albany cycle," a collection of independent but integrated novels centered around his hometown of Albany, New York. As Faulkner did with Yoknapatawpha County, Kennedy creates an extended fictionalized history for his Albany, and he weaves his interconnecting plots and recurring characters—most famously, his street tough and politically savvy Irishmen—throughout seven novels, including the recently released Roscoe.

Gillespie's book arranges itself into discrete chapters for each of Kennedy's cycle of books. Gillespie precedes these analyses with discussions of Kennedy's other writings, most especially his journalism and his first novel, The Ink Truck (1969); this early work is occasionally excluded from discussions of the Albany cycle novels. Gillespie makes it clear, however, that his book differs from other Kennedy criticism in its approach which, as he argues in his introduction, "makes it more important to focus on options for interpretation than to privilege a particular meaning." While Gillespie mentions such former practitioners of this approach as Iser and Barthes, he does not elaborate on their arguments and theories and instead remains confident—and rightly so—that readers can understand his approach and his work on their own terms. Gillespie is interested in explaining the sources and options for how one might read Kennedy's work, as the title of his study makes clear, and not what other critics [End Page 156] ask us to see in the novels from their own readings. Despite his obvious familiarity with such material, references to secondary sources rarely intrude on Gillespie's book. Critical commentary on Kennedy is occasionally cited in the body of the text or in a footnote, but most of the discussion here is about Kennedy's work, almost all of the quotations derive right from Kennedy's own novels, and the footnotes are usually elaborations on Gillespie's own discussion rather than citations of other authors.

With his critical approach defined, Gillespie divides Kennedy's writing career into three chronologically arranged subsections, "Apprenticeship," "Independence," and "Maturity," assigning each of Kennedy's novels to one of these areas. These jargon-free chapters elaborate in clear prose the plots, characters, and conflicts of the novels and then discuss how one might read such novels. At times, Gillespie's discussions seem as humanistic and evaluative as they are interpretive. While discussing the brutal gangster Legs Diamond in Kennedy's second novel, for example, Gillespie argues that "violence propels us to judgment" of the characters; such frequent considerations of this nature provide an almost ethical undertone to Gillespie's work, an unfortunately rare effect in contemporary criticism. And on occasion, in addition to presenting his discussions on the process of reading Kennedy's novels, Gillespie also offers praise —or, in the case of Kennedy's Quinn's Book (1988)—honest criticism of the value of Kennedy's work.

Gillespie's open-ended approach (he calls his study a "guidebook" for "facilitating" the reading of Kennedy's work) makes it difficult to agree or disagree with his readings of Kennedy because he clearly not wish to restrict Kennedy to any one reading. But those "readings" are always plainly presented and frequently punctuated with insights into Kennedy's novels; the discussions of the role of anarchy in The Ink Truck or of community in Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978) attest to the author's perceptiveness. As accessible to undergraduates or casual readers as it would be to professional scholars, the book also might point the way to other approaches to Kennedy. The critical challenge now is to find how Kennedy's Irish-American world defines itself in such other worlds of literary...