Ironweed:

...During the course of the evening Francis is invited to stay, and the question now arises as to whether Francis Phelan can come home or if he is doomed to return to the lonely wet mattresses, cheap gin mills, and empty highways...

...The hero of Kennedy's second novel, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, is a two-bit gambler and pool hustler...

...Having established himself as an important contemporary author, it remains to be seen if he will juxtapose his decadent images with more sensitive and sublime counterparts in an attempt to create a representative Catholic-American literature or if he will continue to pimp himself off to a jaded public which demands ever greater doses of violence, scatology, and sex...

...Francis Phelan again left home, and this time he did not return for twenty-two years...

...When the son of an Albany political czar is kidnapped, the family asks Billy to check out a suspect...

...Francis's troubles began during a trolley strike in 1901, when he picked up a baseball-size rock and busted a scab's head...

...In spite of the fact that the kidnappers are threatening to kill an aquain-tance of his, Billy doesn't want to be a fink...

...In the end mechanical violence robs Diamond of any compassion, sympathy, or understanding which the reader might otherwise feel for him...

...So he tells the family where to go, arid when the kidnappers are caught, the family rewards Billy by having him blackballed from Albany's hot spots...

...Although his efforts have met with general critical acclaim, one might question the validity of his ethnic microcosm and wonder if Kennedy has not merely served up a chic smorgasbord of shallow, perverse, and degenerate Irish characters, who justify all the excuses that know-nothings, nativists and Ku-Kluxers once used to keep these people on their own side of the tracks...

...This is Billy's father, Francis Phelan, murderer, major league third baseman, and derelict, an Irish version of the Wandering Jew, who rides the box cars and sleeps in the hobo jungles of America with his companion, Helen Archer...

...Publishers demand sex and violence for their clientele, and Kennedy caters to these demands admirably...

...Diamond is a shallow character with little to distinguish him from the Legs Diamonds, Al Capones, and John Dillingers whose lives filled the paperback book racks in five- and ten-cent stores a generation ago...

...One day in 1916 he picked up his thirteen-day-old son, Gerald...

...Kennedy's third novel, Ironweed, is Francis Phelan's saga...

...If Kennedy felt that it was necessary to pander his talents in order to break into print, that is behind him now...

...Kennedy's first novel, Legs, a fictionalized account of the career of the gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond, is little more than a collage of violent imagery...

...A newspaper friend writes a column which melts the hearts of the bosses, and Billy is back in his old haunts...

...But in the end Kennedy's triumph is more rhetorical than literary...

...Sean de Hora Ironweed is the third of the "Albany Novels," in which William Kennedy tries to do with Depression-era Albany what Faulkner did with the rural South...

...The family receives him warmly - a bit too warmly perhaps, particularly his wife Annie...

...We follow Francis's odyssey through the soup kitchens, honky tonks, and flophouses of Albany on the last weekend of October 1938 - the weekend of Halloween, All Saints Day, and Orson Welles's famous War of the Worlds broadcast...

...He got away and spent that summer and every summer for the next two decades playing baseball...

...However, there is one minor character who whets the reader's appetite...

...The baby slipped out of his diaper, fell to the floor and broke his neck...

...Although he returned to his family every winter, Francis was destined to be a homeless murderer...

...Hardly tragic, hardly the stuff of great ndvels, and hardly any sympathy for Billy...

...Also, I for one am a little tired of a seemingly endless parade of writers who by virtue of a Celtic surname and a Roman Catholic baptismal certificate are accorded the status of Catholic writers but yet dismiss the faith which inspired Dante and Newman, Hopkins and Auden, as a mere social phenomenon at best, and at worst, superstitious hocus pocus fit only for naive kids, senile hags, and tyrannical old priests...

...Kennedy's graphic, violent, and imaginative imagery has not raised the gangster novel to the level of serious fiction but merely brought talent to a drugstore genre...

...Invited home by his son Billy, Francis shows up one evening with a turkey...

...In spite of the fact that the imagery is again overdone and sensational, and the fact that dialogue does not always measure up to the description, Francis Phelan is Kennedy's best character study yet, and the story is quite moving at times...