Very Old Bones
Elie, Paul
AN OSSUARY OF A NOVEL VERY OLD BONES William Kennedy Viking, $22, 255 pp. Paul Elie hey say William Kennedy put Albany on the literary map. Because I grew up near Albany, the city has always been...
...EDWARD T. OAKES, S.J., teaches in the religious studies program at New York University...
...The first half of the bookpresents a psychoanalytic explanationfor the most salient facts about theMarian cult while the secondaddresses the question of Marianapparitions...
...Cloth: $24.95 ISBN 0-691-07387-2 Princeton University Press 41 WILLWM St • PRINCETON, NJ 08540 • ORDERS: 800-777-4726 • OR FROM YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE Commonweal 22 May 1992: 29 Those who do the great heroic work of being human never work solely from experience...
...Kennedy's sixth novel has the hardscrabble wit, verbal grace, and classicism of all of his work, and yet it points up the liabilities of an artistic method that consists of leaving stories partly told, narrative strands willfully undone...
...And these social changes are accompanied by moral ones: looking at a photo of a group of North End men that hangs in a Broadway bar, Orson observes, "Nobody worried about pasting stars on the chests of those men after they died, the way old man Becker used to...
...But the new book is set two decades after those books, and as the family members gather at the Phelan house in 1958, for the first time since their mother's death, this sense of absence is heightened by the increasing absence of familiar Albany...
...Critics invariably compare Kennedy's Albany to Joyce's Dublin and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, diligently connecting the dots from book to book to build their case that Kennedy has made transcendent the city where I used to go hear punk bands called Capitle...
...The novel is ostensibly a memoir written by Orson Purcell, who, with typically playful self-consciousness, describes himself as a "precocious scholar, sometime newsman, editor of books, working on a book of my own, and on top of it all, a line officer in the big war, what a guy...
...The gambling parlors where erstwhile local hero Billy Phelan once hustled a living have been shut down, the customary two-night Irish wake has been cut back to a single evening, and urban renewal threatens to alter the area irrevocably...
...28:22 May 1992 Commonweal fattening the tittles" of a celebrity memoir for which he is the ghostwriter...
...Who knows...
...EDWARD T. WHEELER is chairman of the English Department at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut...
...William Kennedy Very Old Bones 30: 22 May 1992 Commonweal...
...The city's Irish North End is "in a stage of vanishing tradition, dying to its old self...
...DOTTY LYNCH is apolitical editorfor CBS News...
...I am not implying here that any historical reconstruction is heroic, but rather that imaginative work of the first rank must come about through its creator's subordination of the self, and also from the absorption into that self of what has gone beyond or before its own existence...
...Hey, no star on his chest, but ain't he dead...
...The younger Orson's exploits, written in the ironical, wonderstruck style Kennedy often employs when not describing downand-out types, suggests the liberty that beckons those who truly shake off the yoke of family...
...Robert Orsi, Commonweal Now in paper: $14.95 ISBN 0-691-02867-2 Moving Crucifixes in Modern Spain William A. Christian, Jr...
...But several bouts with the Phelan madness force Orson to seek asylum in Albany, where he attends to two family matters that are the heart of the book...
...The Phelans do, that's who...
...Peter Phelan has never acknowledged Orson as his son-and as Peter has grown old and ill, living and painting in his late mother's house ("the museum of everybody else's rejected past"), Orson has become desperate to lay claim to his ancestry...
...Why are religious visions believed only in certain times and places...
...Because I grew up near Albany, the city has always been on my map, so I've dutifully read the novels in Kennedy's Albany cycle and followed their reception in the press...
...Stars fell and fell, but they didn't rise anymore, and so now the dead and the quick were a collage of uncertain fates...
...And the difficulty of doing so pressed upon me as I read the miscellany that is Very Old Bones...
...Giselle, now a photojournalist, takes family pictures and photographs Peter for Life...
...He lives in Germany...
...But the discussion of the novels as installments in a cycle about Albany and the Phelan family has distracted people from the task of judging them as individual works...
...Orson is our aesthetic guide, and The Cult of the Virgin Mary Psychological Origins Michael P. CarrollTracing devotion to Mary to psychological and historical processes thatbegan in the fifth century, MichaelCarroll answers intriguing questions:What explains the many reports ofMarian apparitions over the centuries?Why is Mary both 'Virgin" and"Mother...
...In this novel, the three main characters persist, in their own ways, in keeping the faith as caretakers of the Albany Irish legacy...
...In the "memoir" that is this novel, Orson recreates these and a host of other episodes from Phelan history-the deaths of his aunts and uncles, the family's vacations on Saratoga Lake, and the teen-age Francis's sexual encounter with an older next-door neighbor, first depicted in Ironweed...
...then sometimes a star would fall and be carried off by the sweeper...
...NICHOLAS CLIFFORD teaches Chinese history at Middlebury College in Vermont, and has recently completed a book on Shanghai in the 1920s...
...RAND RICHARDS COOPER is the author of a book of stories, The Last Go (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...And Peter, lately having become wealthy through the sale of his art, now wishes momentarily to assume the role of munificent patriarch, and so he tells Orson to summon the surviving Phelans for a family council...
...In this fascinating book William Christian investigates the settings of and responses to a series of group visions reported by Spaniards in rural areas in the early part of this century...
...One by one the stars had gone up on those chests through the years...
...Born in Greenwich Village, the illegitimate son of artist Peter Phelan and onetime showgirl Claire Purcell, Orson might have become the first of the Phelans not to be fettered by home and family and religion...
...This "inescapable presence of the absence of fathers" will be familiar to readers of Ironweed and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game...
...ROBERT M. HAYES, a lawyer and former MacArthur fellow, is executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless...
...Later he decamps in New York, scamming still, taking Giselle on a second honeymoon of sorts at the Plaza Hotel, and "expanding the jots and REVIEWERS PAUL BAUMANN is the associate editor of Commonweal...
...PAUL ELIE, a regular Commonweal contributor, is writing a collection of short stories...
...and the Lumpen Proles and Fear of Strangers...
...In light of the social strife and strong anticlerical movements of the period, the author examines how gender and religious politics influenced the experiences of seers and the interpretation of their visions by church officials, journalists, and the public...
...Carroii analysis is Freudian,his descriptions of the apparitionsare precise, and his interpretationsare provocative...
...her affection for her father-in-law is such that when she and Orson find that she is pregnant, there are hints that the familiar cycle of ambiguous paternity has started all over again...
...As a young man he spends the postwar period in the Army in Germany, devising shady schemes and wooing and marrying the Frenchwoman Giselle, a glamorous aspiring photographer...
...ELIZABETH BEVERLY is a writer and ethnographer who teaches at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon...
...Who gives a goddamn...
...My father, for instance, could never have painted his Malachi Suite, that remarkable body of paintings and sketches that made him famous, without having projected himself into the lives of people who had lived and died so absurdly, so tragically, in the days before and after his own birth...
...As it focuses on the Phelan artists, the novel, naturally, is crammed full of ruminations about the place where art and family meet...
...In two celebrated series of paintings, Peter Phelan transmutes into art the legend of his crazed ancestor Malachi and the story of his brother Francis's suicide attempt...
Vol. 119 • May 1992 • No. 10
