Very Old Bones (Contemporary American Fiction) - Softcover

Kennedy, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140138986 ISBN 13: 9780140138986

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1993

Synopsis

For William Kennedy fans, Albany conjures up a tapestry of great beauty and complexity in which the lives of an Irish American family are woven. Earlier Albany novels, including Ironweed, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, whetted our appetites. Now Very Old Bones treats us to one last look at the odd and turbulent Phelans, circa 1958. Stretching the boundaries of life as the Phelans know it, this powerful work flows back and forth in time, riding on the melody of its language. Its great theme is the promise of redemption for those who seek it.

About this title

About the Author:

William Kennedy, author, screenwriter and playwright, was born and raised in Albany, New York. Kennedy brought his native city to literary life in many of his works. The Albany cycle, includes Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, and the Pulitzer Prize winning Ironweed.The versatile Kennedy wrote the screenplay for Ironweed, the play Grand View, and cowrote the screenplay for the The Cotton Club with Francis Ford Coppola. Kennedy also wrote the nonfiction O Albany! and Riding the Yellow Trolley Car. Some of the other works he is known for include Roscoe and Very Old Bones.

Kennedy is a professor in the English department at the State University of New York at Albany. He is the founding director of the New York State Writers Institute and, in 1993, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has received numerous literary awards, including the Literary Lions Award from the New York Public Library, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Governor’s Arts Award. Kennedy was also named Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France and a member of the board of directors of the New York State Council for the Humanities.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Kennedy's latest installment in the Albany cycle (Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed) continues the saga of the Phelan family in a familiar mix of surreal flourishes and gritty naturalism. Humor leavens the mix, but this one is still a grab- bag--a family chronicle that gets weighed down with too many attempts to sum up or recapitulate. It's written as a mock-memoir by Orson Purcell, ``a bit of a magician,'' who is the bastard son of Peter Phelan, older brother of Francis (Ironweed). Orson is attempting to put the humpty-dumpty of familial life together again during a climactic family gathering, in 1958, by chronicling his own life, his father's, and three past generations. Peter, a painter, returns to Albany (from a long exile in Greenwich Village) in 1954, and stays to document the family's history in paint and to care for brother Tommy, a sort of ``holy moron.'' The cast here is large and various: highlights include Francis, who returns in 1934 to attend a family funeral for matriarch Kathryn and nearly commits suicide, and Orson's own colorful interlude in Germany during the Korean War, where he meets Giselle (``I had never been more excited by a woman's body...'') and becomes a cardsharp. While some of this is thumbnail-thin, covering too much ground, Orson's narrative is finally a meditation on art, focused on father Peter, whose artistic cycle includes guilt, remorse, delight with remorse, self-destruction, boredom, and the resumption of art--``art again being the doorway into the emotional life....'' Orson's family saga, then, narrates and enlarges the pictorial one of his father: Kennedy's achievement is to place all of this into a comic structure that is, in the end, elegiac and celebratory. Tough-guy dialogue, hardheaded realism, flights of prose- -Kennedy's trademarks are here, but this one has the feel of a code: ``...we are never without our overcoats, however lice-ridden, of our ancestors.'' -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0140138986
• ISBN 13: 9780140138986
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304