Ironweed

Francis Phelan

Francis Phelan dropped his infant son Gerald on the kitchen floor in 1916 and Gerald died. He has been running from that moment ever since — first through baseball (he was a genuine talent, a major league third baseman), then through drink, then through the life of the Albany bum: the missions, the flophouses, the cold encampments by the railroad tracks.

It is 1938 and Francis is back in Albany for the first time in years. He is picking up the bodies of dead bums from the streets for the city. He is accompanied by Helen, a former concert pianist who is also dying. The ghosts of the people he has killed speak to him.

The Hauntings

Kennedy’s formal decision to render Francis’s guilt as literal haunting is the novel’s most daring move. Gerald, the dead infant, is present in the narrative. So is the scab worker Francis killed during a trolley strike. So are others. They are not melodramatic — they speak in the tones of the dead, which is to say matter-of-factly, without demand.

Ironweed was rejected by more than a dozen publishers before being accepted by Viking under pressure from Saul Bellow, who wrote a letter on Kennedy’s behalf. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. Kennedy continued the Albany Cycle with several later novels, but Ironweed remains its acknowledged masterpiece.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Ironweed apart: The hallucinatory prose — the dead speaking to Francis, the past interrupting the present — is precisely controlled and never arbitrary; Francis Phelan is one of American fiction’s great portraits of guilt as a way of life; and Kennedy’s 1938 Albany is rendered with the specificity of a city both loved and mourned. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Ironweed give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Guilt carried long enough becomes identity — Francis is not a man who did terrible things but a man whose terrible things are all he is. The Depression-era bum is not a social type but a specific person with a specific history — Kennedy insists on this. Going home is not possible for Francis, but it is necessary — what he finds there is not forgiveness but something more complicated. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

William Kennedy’s prose in Ironweed is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The hallucinatory style requires acceptance of its premises — readers wanting realism throughout may resist it. The novel’s place in the Albany Cycle means some resonances are stronger for readers who have read the earlier books. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Literary fiction readers interested in American historical fiction and the Depression era, and anyone drawn to novels of haunted, fallen characters seeking some form of grace.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Kennedy’s Pulitzer masterpiece; Francis Phelan is one of American fiction’s great haunted figures.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with William Kennedy
• Stoner by John Williams — Full Review
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen — Full Review

The Pulitzer and the Thirteen Rejections

Ironweed was published in 1983 as the third novel in William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle, following Ironweed’s protagonists Francis and Helen through October and November of 1938. The novel was rejected by thirteen publishers before Saul Bellow’s intervention — Bellow wrote directly to Viking Press urging them to publish Kennedy’s work — resulted in an acceptance. Viking published the novel in 1983; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1984. Kennedy has described the thirteen rejections as a period of significant professional and personal difficulty; the subsequent recognition made him one of the more dramatic examples in recent American literary history of a writer vindicated by prizes after prolonged commercial failure.

The Albany Cycle

The Albany Cycle is Kennedy’s sustained project — a sequence of novels set in Albany, New York across different periods of the city’s history from the 1850s through the twentieth century. Ironweed is the cycle’s best-known entry, but it is surrounded by Legs (1975), Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978), Quinn’s Book (1988), Very Old Bones (1992), and later additions. The Phelan family, to which Francis belongs, runs across multiple novels, and Albany itself — its political machines, its Irish-American communities, its specific relationship to poverty and power — is the cycle’s true subject. Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep starred in the 1987 film adaptation directed by Héctor Babenco.

Pulitzer Prize and Albany Cycle

Ironweed won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1984 and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983. William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle — a series of interconnected novels set in Albany, New York, across the 20th century — includes Ironweed as its third volume, alongside Legs (1975) and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978). Kennedy had the unusual experience of having Ironweed rejected by thirteen publishers before Viking Press agreed to publish it after Saul Bellow wrote a letter advocating for the book.