Roscoe - Hardcover

Kennedy, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670030295 ISBN 13: 9780670030293

Publisher: Viking Penguin, 2002

Synopsis

The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed recreates the trials and tribulations of Albany life between world wars by following Roscoe, chief architect of Albany's notorious political machine, as his attempts to quit politics forever are thwarted by new political wars, a mysterious death, self-destructive party feuds, and shocking threats to his beloved and her family. 50,000 first printing.

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.

Reviews

"Roscoe Owens Conway presided at Albany Democratic Party headquarters, on the eleventh floor of the State Bank building, the main stop for Democrats on the way to heaven." Thus begins Kennedy's first novel in five years, the seventh installment in his Albany cycle, which includes the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed. He continues to display the insider's confident mastery of fact, the sharp-edged irony that contrasts appearance and reality and the vision of the outcomes to which his characters are fated. Roscoe is fixer for Albany, N.Y., and on V-J Day, 1945, the Democratic machine is under threat. The external enemy is New York's Republican governor, gathering evidence of the widespread corruption gambling, prostitution, violence that hallmarks Democratic leader Patsy McCall's rule. The mysterious suicide of Elisha Fitzgibbon, the machine's moneyman, sets the events in motion. Internally, the machine is strife ridden: Roscoe must patch up the hostility between McCall and his brother over a cockfight; he must deal with the conflict between police lieutenant and McCall gunsel Jeremiah "Mac" McEvoy and Roscoe's brother, O.B., the chief of police; and he must secure the mayoral re-election of Alex, Elisha's son. Meanwhile, Roscoe seems near a lifelong goal: marrying Veronica, Elisha's widow. As in all of Kennedy's Albany novels, the town is rendered with a hallucinatory, three-dimensional density. The seams of the past from politics to business to crime are split open, but Roscoe's job is to keep Albany's secret history secret. A good man at heart, he is corrupted by his means (blackmail, lies and faked testimony) until his dearest goals are thwarted. This is an engrossing, comic vision of the dark side of politics as the "art of the possible." Readers who were disappointed by the thinness of The Flaming Corsage, the Albany novel that preceded this one, will rejoice at the arrival of the full-blooded Roscoe. 10-city author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Roscoe Owen Conway is the ROC upon which Albany's Democratic Party is built. Roscoe is a combination of contrasts: a lawyer with no practice, a brewery owner who drinks gin, and a politician who holds no office. And he is a man with a broken heart, both literally (there's clotted blood in his ticker) and figuratively (he's desperately pining away for his best friend's wife). Roscoe will do anything and everything legal or not for the party, but for him the party is over. Kennedy's seventh novel is a sprawling political romp covering the roughly 12 weeks between V-J Day through Election Day, 1945, with flashbacks and asides detailing two decades of enough political corruption, crooked cops, cockfights, whores, gambling, and bootleggers to fill Sing Sing twice! Kennedy writes with great humor and marvelous attention to detail both in language and setting, and the book functions as a political expos? as well as a romance and to an extent a mystery, which leaves the reader guessing. But principally it is about a man who has made a career out of trading in lies and deceit but who nonetheless still can clearly discern the truth about himself. With Roscoe, Kennedy proves again that the American literary novel is not dead, it's just moved to Albany. Highly recommended. Michael Rogers, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

*Starred Review* Roscoe Conway has been the brains and driving force of Albany's formidable Democratic machine ever since he came home from World War I with a bullet lodged near his heart. In concert with his two closest pals, Elisha and Patsy, he's been in on every scheme, scam, and crime in his rough-and-tumble hometown, rigging elections, practicing patronage, and strong-arming the press. Connected to politicians, cops, judges, bookies, madams, gangsters, cockfighters, and gamblers, Roscoe is the consummate fixer, and yet he's a soulful man, a gallant warrior willing to sacrifice all for his party and friends. In his seventh Albany novel, Pulitzer Prize winner Kennedy continues to write vigorous, vivid, and exalted prose shaped by his fascination with the smoky and mysterious dimensions of life, the crooked underworld and the ghostly otherworld, and set to the haunting music of his wryly mythic and Shakespearean romanticism. As the curtain rises, World War II has just ended, and Kennedy's hero, a corpulent and unwell 55, tells his cohorts that he's had enough and wants out. But Elisha, whose medal-festooned soldier son is Albany's current mayor, beats Roscoe to it by dying under suspicious circumstances. Patsy's counting on Roscoe to keep things in order, and so is Elisha's beautiful and vulnerable widow, Veronica, the unrequited love of Roscoe's improvisational life. This is the kernel of Kennedy's seductive, bloody, and lushly atmospheric novel, a melodrama replete with a stellar cast, sizzling dialogue, and a mise-en-scene as morbidly glamorous and searingly human as photographs by Weegee. Sexy and magical, muscular and comic, gritty and contemplative, Kennedy's tale of a mendacious yet noble errant knight who never leaves home and yet ends up homeless is sublime. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Penguin
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670030295
• ISBN 13: 9780670030293
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 291