We’re just chasing five copies for lucky readers – keep an eye out in the comments for that. Just in case you need more inducement, here’s an excellent primer on the long and impressive career of William Kennedy, written by Emma Brockes in the Guardian in 2012. My guess is that it will have the same effect on many readers. Both characters had success, failure and love in their.

His tough-minded and defiant humanism has left me chastened but feeling good. Francis and Helen come with a history that is painted with more than booze, ratty clothes and body odor. Kennedy’s Irish stews, crooks, roughnecks, cons, gamblers, bums, pols and working stiffs have been moving around in my head, setting examples, giving good advice. Read reviews from the worlds largest community for readers. In spite of my prejudices, for the last few weeks Mr. The usually straight-faced Kirkus Reviews went positively Neal Cassady over it, excitedly declaring that Kennedy’s prose “curlicues in extravagant declamations, levitates into hellfire profanations, and celebrates the bonding of an underculture’s fine, boozy chivalry – like those pre-stupor moments in a Saturday-night bar when the consciousness peers into poetry and the cosmos”.īut my favourite contemporary review of the book came in the New York Times, where George Stade outlined why he hated “lyrical novelists” and just about everything he assumed Kennedy stood for – before actually reading the book and realising he loved it. When the book was released, Saul Bellow declared it “distinguished”, while the Guardian praised its “dark lyricism”.

Ironweed book review