FREE: Very Old Bones, A Novel by William Kennedy

The listing, Very Old Bones, A Novel by William Kennedy has ended.

Hardback book in brand new condition.

William Kennedy's Albany has become for American letters the equivalent of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, for Kennedy has appropriated a parcel of American land and turned it into a mythic playground where three generations of a fevered Irish-American family cavort hilariously, dramatically, sensually, and tragically against the landscape of time. There are the earlier novels in the Albany Cycle, Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed, and Quinn's Book. And now, with Very Old Bones, Kennedy offers perhaps the most assured, most mature, and most accomplished of all his works.

Again, we enter the turbulent world of the Phelans. The time is 1958 and the novel's narrator, Orson Purcell, the unacknowledged ***** son of Peter Phelan, is helping his putative father deliver his will, in person, to his family--"a patriarchal whim that he hoped would redirect everybody's life." Orson Purcell's life has been redirected in various ways. This brilliant misfit, stationed in Germany diring the Korean War, meets and marries the beauteous and inscrutable Giselle, and soon afterward plunges into madness. Once he is back in New York, when his world again seems to be crashing around him, madness returns. But he finds a measure of sanity, and more, when he takes sanctuary in Albany with the Phelans, who, one by one, come vibrantly to life in these pages.

The Phelans, as Orson sees, are not doing all that well either. There are the brothers: Chick, the would-be priest, whose marriage plans are endlessly thwarted by his sister Sarah, the nun-like mother figure obsessed with chastity; and Tommy, the holy moron who gives gifts of underwear to women he doesn't know. There is Molly, the sister whose intense love affair holds secrets that only another love can resurrect; and then comes Francis Phelan, the exiled hero of Ironweed, whom young Orson meets in 1934 at a family funeral.