The Nature Of Truth William Kennedy’s Writing Reads Less Like Fiction Than History As It Should Have Been

“The Flaming Corsage” By William Kennedy (Viking, 209 pages, $23.95)

In Upstate New York, “Albany” is a word with a meaning beyond mere geography. It represents political power, a balance of rural and small-town Upstate against the mammoth influence of the overwhelming, immense City at the far-off mouth of the Hudson.

As a place, Albany is no different from other small Upstate New York cities - rundown towns long past any usefulness or meaning, redolent of ghosts and tales of the good old days. Yet, as the seat of state government, Albany still retains a stubborn patina of importance and dignity.

Though William Kennedy largely ignores state politics in his justly famous Albany cycle of novels, he has taken this aura of centrality and used it to imbue his saga of Irish immigrants with a grandeur and universal meaning that is close to Melville or Faulkner. His cycle is not just a history of Albany or America, it’s a history of humanity.

From “Quinn’s Book” to “Ironweed” to “Very Old Bones,” Kennedy has gone from the 1840s to the late 1950s, following the generations of three families, the Quinns, the Phelans and the Daughertys, each notable for achievement and scandals.

It’s not necessary to read - or reread - the previous novels to enjoy “The Flaming Corsage;” in fact, it’s better not to. Kennedy is telling one of the old stories here, one we’ve heard bits and pieces of before, and one of the pleasures of his method is the way his discursive narratives resemble reminiscence, full of elliptical digressions and extended flashbacks and flash-forwards.

Reading Kennedy’s novels is like listening to a favorite great-uncle tell tales of the olden days, back when “this place was really something.” (The conclusion that the place is now really nothing is foregone.) This is town gossip raised up to legend: the way things “should” have happened, an imagined truth with the form and structure of a novel.

Kennedy has the main story down now, the structure set. As he showed in his last novel, “Very Old Bones,” he can move smoothly through eras, catching his characters at various stages of life, revisiting incidents from earlier novels, filling in details, introducing minor characters who might be featured in later novels. It’s as if he’s no longer imagining stories, but relating history.

Previous novels have mostly centered on the Phelans: the impetuous and violent Francis, labor goon turned ballplayer turned bum; Peter, the artist; Billy, the noble gamesplayer and hustler. The focus of “The Flaming Corsage” is Edward Daugherty, the scandalously bohemian playwright and next-door neighbor of the Phelans.

Daugherty, mentor to Peter and chronicler of Francis’ labor radicalism, has been central to Phelan lives. Daugherty’s son, Martin, has been Peter’s best friend and Billy’s protector. Daugherty’s wife, Katrina, was Francis’ lover. First seen as a senile old man mumbling into his potatoes in “Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game,” Daugherty is presented here as if in a series of sepia snapshots: a rakish newspaperman and young dandy of the 1880s; a prosperous and successful writer throwing lavish parties in the 1890s; a diffident philanderer in 1908, trapped by circumstance and betrayal into disgrace as the villain of “The Love Nest Murders,” a newspaper account of which opens the novel.

Edward straddles class lines. He is friends with Giles Fitzroy, a well-to-do doctor, as well as Thomas Maginn, a roguish newspaperman. Maginn - scheming, rough-hewn and treacherous - is what Edward might have been if he hadn’t had the advantage of being sponsored by one of the Albany’s leading citizens. But Daugherty finds that as “a new kind of being,” he doesn’t so much transcend class lines; it’s more as if he’s stretched across them, like a victim on a rack.

Edward marries a daughter of Old Albany: Katrina Taylor - Episcopal, patrician, of Dutch and Anglo-Irish parentage. She’s also rebellious, a lover of Baudelaire and Verlaine, prone to impulsive acts and “private dramas.” As she gets older, she retreats further into her interior life. Given to wandering about unclothed, she seduces the young Francis Phelan - a story glossed over here, but detailed in “Ironweed.” In that novel, Katrina seemed just a troubled lady, out of place in the working-class Irish neighborhood her husband had brought her to, eccentric and flighty. In “The Flaming Corsage,” we find out the sources of her disturbed behavior, and learn what’s in the depths of her personality.

“The Flaming Corsage” is also the title of the play Daugherty writes about his scandalous affair with the young actress Melinda Spencer, and both the play and the scandal have been recurring motifs in the cycle, mentioned in every book.

This is obviously a novel that Kennedy has long been planning, charting the passage of Edward and Katrina from bright courtship (forebodingly, in a cemetery), through betrothal (against the wishes of both sets of parents), to the tragic event that ultimately splits the marriage and leaves both adrift.

Yet the more we learn about the Daughertys and their troubles, the less we seem to know about them. Katrina remains ethereal, the explanations for her behavior unsatisfying. But Kennedy may not believe he can tell us everything about her. His point seems to be that every truth is unreliable. His theme here is the nature of truth itself.

“The Flaming Corsage” is more experimental and intertextual than previous novels in the series. Present in its style are many kinds of narrative, none of which tells the whole story: faux Henry James thriller, newspaper articles, anecdotes, stage drama.

This is William Kennedy as postmodern novelist, but even that is a mere guise. “The Flaming Corsage” is an elaborate parody of postmodernist trickery, a subtle and ultimately dazzling book by an American master.