Ironweed

Kennedy stages guilt as literal haunting rather than metaphor: Francis, a former big-league third baseman turned Depression-era Albany bum, is trailed by the actual ghosts of men he's killed or failed — a scab he struck dead during a trolley strike, a stranger, and most unbearably his own infant son Gerald, dropped fatally by accident in a moment Francis has never stopped serving time for in his own head. That the dead speak to him, comment on his day, sit beside him on benches, refuses the reader any comfortable distance from Francis's guilt; the past isn't remembered here, it's cohabiting.

Ironweed itself, the plant Francis is likened to in the title, is a scrappy, tenacious wildflower that grows in wasted ground precisely because nothing else will — Kennedy's image for a man reduced to the literal margins of graveyards, missions, and junk-strewn lots who keeps surviving anyway, less from hope than from sheer refusal to finish dying. The novel's recurring cemetery scenes, where Francis visits and converses with those he's wronged, treat Albany's underclass dead with the same interiority as its living, insisting a bum's memory of his own son deserves the same gravity a respectable family's grief would automatically be given.

Francis's baseball past, glimpsed in flashback as a minor local celebrity's brush with a bigger life, works as a counterweight to his present degradation: strangers still occasionally recognize him, a flicker of dignity the novel refuses to let curdle into pure irony. Kennedy keeps returning to Francis's hands — a ballplayer's hands, a killer's hands, a father's hands that let an infant slip — as the single physical detail that ties his whole biography together, the same instrument responsible for both his one moment of grace and his defining catastrophe.

The novel's episodic wandering through one Halloween-week in Albany — missions, saloons, junkyards, graveyards — borrows the shape of a descent narrative, Francis moving through underworld way stations that mirror his own memory more than any literal geography. Kennedy grew up in Albany and worked there as a journalist for years before this novel, the third in his loosely connected Albany Cycle, found a publisher only after repeated rejections; its Pulitzer, awarded the following year, was widely read as vindication of a book about people American fiction routinely treats as beneath notice.

Francis's traveling companion Helen, a once-trained singer now dying of a tumor and clinging to fragments of former respectability, gets a full interior chapter of her own memory and self-mythology before her death in a fleabag hotel room — Kennedy's formal insistence that every derelict life in this novel carries a comparably rich, tragic history, whether or not anyone still living bothers to ask.