Book review: Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

Like most American novelists William Kennedy has done a stint teaching creative writing. I don’t know what his students made of him, but the great thing about his own novels is that they are a long way distant from the sort of well-crafted but often bloodless products of the creative writing academies.

Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

by William Kennedy

Simon & Schuster, 328pp, £16.99

They are tough, rumbustious and often incoherent. But they are incoherent the way Faulkner’s novels are incoherent. That’s to say, the incoherence is superficial; bits don’t fit neatly together. The narrative line darts about. Conversations ramble. The dialogue is mannered and yet full of vitality.

Structurally the novels are a mess, just as life is. Yet they hang together. Their energy is remarkable and they belong, one feels, to an older and more exuberant, America. This latest novel, published last year in the US, is extraordinary, and not only because Kennedy is now in his eighties.

Kennedy is best known for his sequence of novels set in Albany, corrupt capital of New York State. He was born and grew up there and worked much of his life as a newspaperman there. One likes to think of him as the old-fashioned newspaperman who walked the mean streets in search of stories telling what the bosses didn’t want to be told. A good deal of this novel is set in Albany in the 1960s at the time of race riots and the Civil Rights movement. Much of it happens on the day Bobby Kennedy, senator for New York State, was shot in California.

It begins, however, in Cuba in the 1950s when the vicious Batista dictatorship, backed by both the Mob and the CIA, was being challenged by idealistic young liberals and also by Fidel Castro. Young Daniel Quinn, from a family featured in most of the Albany novels, arrives in Havana, fresh from college, with ambitions to be a journalist.

He meets Ernest Hemingway in the Floridita Bar on a night when Hemingway lays out a cocky American he has taken a scunner at – an incident that will provoke a ridiculous duel – and he falls in love with a gorgeous Cuban girl, Renata. So Quinn gets caught up in the revolutionary action along with Renata, and a mobster acquaintance who is ready to run guns to Castro. The political-military action is presented to us with enormous and irresistible verve. Kennedy does action splendidly and convincingly, and this marks his books out as happily different from the common run of campus novels.

The narrative switches abruptly in the second section to Albany, though there are flashbacks to Cuba. It is impossible to summarise, so rich is it in character and incident. Conversations stretch over pages, and the cast of politicians, journalists, crooks, whores, drunkards, musicians, idealists, priests, policemen, civil rights workers and Lord knows what else is huge. There are times when readers may be excused for wondering what is happening, or where this is all heading.

Indeed, even the most attentive reader may feel lost. It doesn’t matter. The thing is to go with the swing, right from the first pages, set in Albany in 1936 when the eight-year-old Daniel comes downstairs to find a piano being installed and Bing Crosby and black musicians syncopating. The music they make runs all through the novel, which also sees Daniel’s father George, who has brought the piano home, move over 30 years from being a bright smart operator of the numbers game to having a senility in which his wandering mind and steps nevertheless still have a snap in them.

If you get lost, don’t worry. Just let yourself drift with the tide as Kennedy invites you into a world of “lumpen youths, of women who shop-lifted by day and whored by night, of winos with nothing better to do once they woke up and found they were still alive, of matrons with children but not husbands, scraping a life together, of widows and retirees looking for an alternative to solitude”. That’s one side of things, treated with generosity and sympathy. But there is also glamour and style, and seriousness about politics and justice and injustice.

In short it’s terrific stuff, and if the richness of the novel recalls Faulkner, that’s because it’s almost as good as Faulkner, which is a high compliment because nobody in this tradition of writing is as good as Faulkner; it’s quite something, though, that Kennedy invites the comparison to the greatest of American novelists.

So it’s a novel to lose yourself in, and, if you do that, you will find out a lot about America and maybe even about yourself.