The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- June 2008
by William Kennedy
We call them "homeless" these days, but back in the 1930s, they were just bums. Maybe hobos. We don't see a lot of hobos these days. The Depression was a different era, one in which we seemed to understand better the overwhelming circumstances that made people "go on the bum", become homeless, ride the rails and live on the fringes of society. As a society, we eventually created a safety net for the economic outcasts, but we probably haven't gotten any more sympathetic to them. Back in the 30s, bums were rousted from encampments and railyards, generally harrassed, and that hasn't changed all that much. We'll always have the homeless, but we desperately need a better world. Our tolerance for such destitution verges on the criminal. This is the story of Francis Phelan, a 58-year-old bum, living on the streets of Albany, New York. He started life on a fair footing, a talented baseball player with a lovely wife and a couple of kids. The book opens on him finding some work filling graves in the cemetery after being caught registering ghost voters for the Democrats (are we still doing that, too?). In the cemetery, he encounters the grave of his infant son, the child who died in a tragic accident that is the source of Fran's problems with drink. He has a buddy, Rudy, who is dying of cancer, and a woman friend, Helen, who is down and out from a promising musical career after her family cut her off. But encountering his son's grave makes Fran begin a journey back into his past, where he encounters the ghosts of the men he has seen die, some of them at his hand, the ghosts of ballplayers, and back to the family who still lives there in Albany. Kennedy's depiction of life on the streets is vivid, challenging and gritty. These folks are unapologetic about the compromises that help them survive. They are at the mercy of people who are better off (like the homeless of today), and their life expectancy is short. The ghostly exploration of Fran's past is evocative, and the author's depiction of the times and these people's dreams owes a lot to Dos Passos and writers like him. It's a troubling story, with notes of hope. Would that we could create a world in which there is more hope than trouble.
(For this novel, Kennedy was awarded the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.)