Book
Reviews
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times
Archives |
|||
|
Roscoe
by William Kennedy Recommendation: ••• |
|
||
|
Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|
||
|
|
|||
|
Maturity Only a mature writer could have produced
as deep and fine a character and novel as Roscoe.
Tangled relationships, political fixes, and love and loss fill the pages of
the latest William Kennedy novel in the Albany series. There’s ample wisdom
to consider, including, “Roscoe decided long ago that only a bet on the
impossible makes sense. It is an art of faith and courage requiring an
irrational leap over reason. A man wins simply by making such a bet.” When it
comes to description and images, Kennedy shines: “As he walked to
his car, Roscoe saw a crow, blacker and larger than crows he had known, and female,
which he deduced after she landed on an upper branch of an oak tree and was immediately
set upon by another large, black crow, which mounted her; and they lay
sideways on the branch and copulated. Roscoe stopped the car to watch and
became convinced that the female crow was smiling. Roscoe might have taken
this to be a good omen, but it was too proximate to his kiss, the crows were
black as sin, and they were crows enthralled by passion. They were the crows
of fornication. In addition to capturing the post-World
War II attitudes and concerns, Roscoe connects back to World War I and the generational
issues by which soldiers in each war identify themselves. Here’s a mood scene
at the beginning of a chapter: “There is nothing
like the back room of a dimly lit bar on a summer afternoon when the heat is
smothering the city’s life; and so Roscoe has come to a half-walled private
corner in Mike Quinlan’s dark dungeon of drink to triumph over this
unseasonable heat, a ninety-eight-degree day when summer should be spent. A cold
beer in a short glass, and then another, cures the heat in Roscoe’s heart, and
the sweat of the glass cools the palm of his hand. Slowly the sweet placenta
overgrows his brain, and the afternoon moves weightlessly along, as he waits
for whatever comes next in his scheme to unleash the new Roscoe.” Kennedy makes Albany and fascinating
characters come alive in Roscoe,
and each word he chooses brings us deeper into the place and the time. Steve Hopkins, February 1, 2002 |
|||
|
|
|||
|
ã 2002 Hopkins and Company, LLC |
|||
