in a quest for pure flight as a fulfilling mannerism of the spirit.') Still the warrior among a drift of bums, then, Francis also cronys with pal Rudy-with Helen, the wilted blossom, who's proud she chose (wasn't pushed into) a middle-age of bumming. from family, from bondage, from destitution of spirit. and it was as pleasurable to his being as it was natural: the running of bases after the crack of a bat, the running from accusation. (It was then that 'the compulsion to flight first hit.

And, in the cemetery, he communes with the family and neighborhood dead-especially those whose demises were linked to Francis, the 'family killer': for the first time he spends a moment at the grave of his infant son Gerald, killed when Francis dropped him by accident there's Rowdy Dick, smashed against a wall when he tried to cut off Francis' feet and, of course, doomed motorman Harold Allen, whom Francis killed in a long-ago strike with a stone aimed sure and true. Francis, a former baseball big-leaguer, is now given to 'alcoholic desolation,' taking on a few bucks by digging graves. In this third novel in Kennedy's Depression-Albany series, the focus is on aging, bumming Francis Phelan, sire of small-town gambler Billy (Billy Phelan's Greatest Came, 1978) and again the grand-talking prose curlicues in extravagant declamations, levitates into hellfire profanations, and celebrates the bonding of an underculture's fine, boozy chivalry-like those pre-stupor moments in a Saturday-night bar when the consciousness peers into poetry and the cosmos.

Ironweed by william kennedy