Only four Guild members remain: Bailey, Rosenthal, Irma, and Jarvis, their leader. The novel focuses on the headquarters of a Newspaper Guild strike committee on the one-year anniversary of its strike against the daily newspaper of a town resembling Albany. Kennedy’s first published novel, The Ink Truck, connects less strongly to these themes and styles than do later works. As his books unfold, one from another, he makes novel connections, adeptly developing the hallucinations of Bailey, the protagonist of The Ink Truck, the extrasensory perception of Martin Daugherty, one of the central consciousnesses of Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, and the ghosts of his victims visiting Francis Phelan on his quest for redemption in Ironweed.

Kennedy is not, however, a derivative writer. Kennedy’s style has been compared to that of sixteenth century French novelist François Rabelais for its opulent catalogs and its ribald scatology. Albany, like Boston, attracted a large Irish Catholic population, which brought its churches, schools, family ties, political machine, and underworld connections. The place is Albany, New York, the capital city-nest of corrupt politics heritor of Dutch, English, and Irish immigrants home to canallers, crooks, bums and bag ladies, aristocrats, and numberswriters. William Kennedy’s (born, January 16, 1928) fiction is preoccupied with spirit of place, language, and style, and a mystic fusing of characters and dialogue.

Ironweed book review