Digging up the family plot
Charles Maclean
VERY OLD BONES by William Kennedy Ming, £14.99, pp. 292 In his campaign of 1926 to gain wider recognition for the work of Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald complained of the dozens of American writers who botched their books by the insincere com- pulsion to write 'significantly' about Ameri- ca:
Insincere, because it is not a compulsion found in themselves — it is 'literary' in the most belittling sense.
Fitzgerald was attacking a then fashionable concern for novels about American life, a sort of literary gold-rush to find home- grown material that hadn't been 'used' material that he felt was mostly being turned undigested into poorly imagined fiction. While at the same time welcoming the arrival of a new writer who was in the best sense thoroughly American, Fitzgerald recognised that the idea of 'America' (never the same after its celebration by Whitman and Dreiser) would always haunt the imaginations of American novelists to the detriment of their work.
The compulsion to write significantly about America continues to botch books. Yet this reaching beyond the subject- matter for some mythical dimension, the dream of national relevance (that wins national acclaim), the absurd quest for the Great American Novel, are pursued by writers and promoted by publishers as if these were the only aims of American liter- ature. The dust-jacket of Very Old Bones, the latest novel by William Kennedy, assures us that although his work is mostly set in Albany, New York,
his books transcend the regional, and stand as a broad statement on American life, the city as a microcosm of the national experi- ence.
If this could be said to be true of earlier novels in Kennedy's Albany Cycle, like the Pulitzer Prize-winning and somewhat turgid Ironweed, it is a measure of the assured maturity and accomplishment of the present novel that, by and large, it escapes the handicap of such belittling `significance'. An ostensible memoir of his famous father, narrated in the year 1958 by aspiring writer Orson Purcell — he is the illegitimate son of Peter Phelan, artist, who
escaped from Albany to find success in the bohemian Greenwich Village of the 1930s — the novel flows back and forth in time recounting the generational saga of a sadly thwarted, if not cursed, often tragic, yet gloriously harum-scarum Irish-American family. Anyone familiar with the Phelans and their extensive kin from Kennedy's earlier novels will enjoy returning to their turbulent world. For the uninitiated, the book's endpapers provide an indispensable family tree.
There are scenes in Very Old Bones that come across as over-slick, sepia vignettes of Broadway bars and downtown nightclubs, of a dilapidated hotel on Lake Saratoga or the Plaza in New York, where Orson has an eidetic vision of Fifth Avenue peopled by the likes of Edith Wharton, Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich. They give the novel a nostalgic gloss which is too reminiscent of the mythopoeic writing of E L Doctorow or, for that matter, a Neil Diamond song about looking for America. But for the most part Kennedy's sense of the past is sure and sharp, his memory for the precise feelings of time and place as remarkably fresh as the prose he employs to bring his characters vibrantly to life.
The hero has adventures in Germany and Gotham, but the real action goes on behind the lace-curtained windows of the Phelan family home on Colonie Street, where the patriarchal Peter Phelan has called together the surviving clan to read his will, portion out money and let them view the 'Malachi Suite', a set of narrative paintings inspired by the hair-raising deeds of their early Albany ancestor, Malachi Mcllhenny. Closet skeletons that have been rattling away throughout the book are exposed in its final chapters as the narra- tor's descriptions of the paintings turn almost magically into chilling flashbacks to 1887, when the family's destiny was fixed. If this sounds a little too convenient, the novel is so well constructed, and written (despite the odd flight of whimsy that works because of the tegorrah' factor, the Irishman's uncringing ease with language and ideas) with such devious economy — Orson's rather pompous memoir is con- stantly subverted by stories, diversions and asides which in telling of the family's mis- placed joys and desires, its jaunty wakes and hidden madnesses drive the narrative forward — that the reader can safely wal- low in dramatic revelation, as the burden of history is raised high enough to allow some of the Celtic gloom to be dispersed.
Some, not too much. This is, after all, a happy book, fully imagined, hardly botched.
The fact that the Phelans are not obsessed with the pursuit of money and happiness makes Very Old Bones seem almost defiantly irrelevant to contemporary America. Orson, 'fugitive from the isolato's disease', comes drifting back, as did his father, into the bosom of the family, under no illusions that he is joining anything but a
collective of the thwarted spirit, of the com- munal psyche that so desperately wants not to be plural.
The bleak comforts of compromise, the estrangements and reconciliations, the artistic inspiration and source of love the Phelans variously find in the family matrix, in the generational perspective that can set even trapped and wasted lives on the road to redemption, may seem disturbingly alien (some 40 years on) to a nation of isolated individuals, an America that quietly abol- ished the family while extolling its virtues. Wrongly accused of making a broad state- ment on American life, Kennedy deserves to be congratulated for exhuming such curious relics from the barely recoverable past and telling a very old story that he has made his own dazzlingly well.
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