- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); 17th edition (Feb 29 1984)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0140070206
- ISBN-13: 978-0140070200
- Product Dimensions: 19.7 x 13.1 x 1.1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 45 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #169,774 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"A powerfully affecting work, abounding in humor and heartbreak."--Chicago Tribune Bookworld
"A remarkable and most original novel."--Alison Lurie
"A remarkable and most original novel."--Alison Lurie
Book Description
Ironweed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is the best-known of William Kennedy's three Albany-based novels. Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany in a hurry after killing a scab during a trolley workers' strike; he ran away again after accidentally—and fatally—dropping his infant son. Now, in 1938, Francis is back in town, roaming the old familiar streets with his hobo pal, Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and the present...
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
a plot outline for a greater novel,
By A Customer
This review is from: Ironweed (Paperback)
given, i havent finished the novel, but the reading so far has been less than satisfying. this is so poorly written and disconnected from emotion, which is a culminating aspect of the writer's obligation. for example, he writes:"didn't mean to kill you," francis said. Was that why you threw that stone the size of a potato and broke open my skull? My brains flowed out and I died. the lack of compassion is humurious but highly inappropriate for the subject matter discussed. kennedy breaks all good novelist laws in his attempts to more easily and directly provide information-- he leaves nothing to the reader's imagination in sentences like "his lesson to francis was this: that life is full of caprice and missed connections, that theivery is wrong, especially if you get caught..." i cant speak for the rest of these nutty critics, but as a writer, one of the first things i learned was "show, dont tell" and to create a sophisticated voice to appeal to your reader. if you cant see that this writer is missing the most important aspects of his job, then you must not be reading the same book as i.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Work of Art,
By
This review is from: Ironweed (Paperback)
William Kennedy's Ironweed is a skillfully crafted work of art. Billy Phelan is an often-drunk, murderous bully and, at other times, a very compassionate and generous person. This is not an unusual combination. He is running from mistakes of the past, and creating new problems along the way. Billy is an unlikely likeable character, and we want him to overcome the ruinous side of his personality.The book successfully employs unusual literary devices and great metaphors. These literary devices include (1) the "living" dead in the cemetery, (2) the seemingly real ghosts that constantly haunt Billy Phelan, (3) temporary shift from past to conditional tense near the end of the book, and (4) the mixing of vivid memories into the current situation which tends to blur time and place. Kennedy composes many haunting metaphors. Here's one: "Helen now sees the spoiled seed of a woman's barren dream: a seed that germinates and grows into a shapeless, windblown weed blossom of no value to anything, even its own species, for it produces no seed of its own; a mutation that grows only into the lovely day like all other wild things, and then withers, and perishes, and falls, and vanishes."
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Herculean Struggle with the Past,
By Ian Gordon Malcomson (Victoria, BC) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME) (TOP 10 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Ironweed (Paperback)
As the first novel in his Albany Cycle, Kennedy has definitely produced one tough, hard-nosed novel about surviving on the street during America's Great Depression. How brutal is life for Francis Phelan, a middle-age hobo consumed with a deep-seated guilt and a lot of fading memories about the good times? Kennedy succeeds in creating a stirring tale of one man's efforts to stay alive in the present while haunted by failures in the past. Francis, after twenty-two years of absence from his hometown of Albany, New York returns home to try and put the pieces back together. There is his failing as a husband and father to be accounted for; his sense of mental anguish at indirectly causing his baby son's death; and his inability to succeed at a baseball career that has Francis in a state of mental torment. Everywhere he goes, he is harassed by the ghosts of the past that mock him for his woeful inadequacies. The reader should be under no illusion that what he or she has encountered is a loser pure and simple, who chooses to wallow in his despair so much that it's small wonder he doesn't self-destruct. Alcohol (hooch and beer) becomes the opiate that dulls the haunting memories and searing pains of his miserable past. His life has been reduced to connecting with like-minded derelicts who encourage him to stay alive long enough in the present to somehow realize the tantalizing lure of the future. This is a very captivating story that encompasses a man's efforts to find a glimmer of fulfillment in a social wasteland called the Depression. While the story is probably quite overdone in places to the point of becoming nauseating and dismal, Kennedy definitely creates one tough `Ironweed' character, who in the movie is played by no less than Jack Nicholson himeself. His description of the local sites and scenery makes Albany come alive as a city that contains a distant past, a very real present, and an alluring future.
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