Ironweed
by William Kennedy
Summary
Francis Phelan comes back to Albany at Halloween in 1938, twenty two years after he ran. He had been a major league third baseman. He left because he lifted his thirteen day old son Gerald to change him, dropped him, and broke the child's neck, and could not stay in a house where that had happened.
He is now a bum, sleeping in weeds, doing a day's work digging graves in the cemetery where the baby is buried and where his parents watch him from under the ground and comment. The dead talk to Francis throughout, including the strikebreaker he killed with a stone in 1901 and the man whose skull he broke in a fight, and they are neither symbolic nor forgiving.
With him is Helen, once a music student, now ill and proud and refusing to be pitied, and their days consist of finding a bed, finding a drink, and finding one more day. He buys a turkey and walks up the hill to see the wife he left, and the scene at that table is the whole book.
Kennedy refuses the two obvious positions. Francis is not a victim of the Depression and he is not a bum with a heart of gold. He is a man who did several unforgivable things, knows precisely what they were, and is neither asking to be excused nor able to stop weighing them.
It is about two hundred and thirty pages, hallucinatory and very grand in its language, with the dead speaking from the trees and a prose style pitched somewhere between Joyce and a police report, and it moves fast for something this dense.
Expect a great deal of drinking, cold and violence, and a final third that is unexpectedly hopeful without promising anything. Best for readers who want the Depression written from underneath it rather than about it.
Historical Context & Significance
Ironweed won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award, and William Kennedy received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1983.
Thirteen publishers turned the manuscript down first. Kennedy's two previous Albany novels had sold poorly, and the subject was thought hopeless. What changed it was a letter from Saul Bellow, who had taught Kennedy years earlier, scolding Viking that a manuscript by the author of Billy Phelan looking for a publisher was, in his word, "disgraceful". Viking took the book, reissued the two earlier novels, and marketed the three together as the Albany Cycle, a sequence Kennedy has since extended past half a dozen volumes.
Hector Babenco filmed it in 1987 with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, both of whom were nominated for Academy Awards.