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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780140070200
ISBN number: 0140070206
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 240
Printing Date: February 07, 1984
Publishing house: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Sale Popularity Level: 57890
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
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Product Description:
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is now a movie directed by Hector Babenco ( Kiss of the Spider Woman) starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. Nicholson plays Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, a man trying to make peace with the ghosts of his past and present. 8 pages of photos.
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Rated by buyers 
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This is the absolute worst Pulitzer winner I've ever read. Were there no other books written in 1983? The author is constantly switching around in time and place in his story. Just when you think someone's dead, they show back up again in the narrative. This makes for a very confusing read. I suppose it's written like we remember things from our lives: out of order such that the past and the present, the dead and the living all intertwine.
Frankly, I wasn't impressed. The main character, Francis, leaves his wife and family and becomes a bum after he accidentally drops the baby on its head and kills it. 20 years later, he's a nearly toothless drunk drifting from mission to abandoned building to stripped car every night looking for a place to lay his head. And he carries all the ghosts of the past with him in his memories. He refuses to come home even now because he still feels the need to do penance for dropping the 13-day-old baby on the head (among other deaths he has caused along the way involving cracked skulls). And that's seriously all there is to the story. A brilliant work it's not.
Rated by buyers 
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Why review a book, which was published years ago? Ironweed is in paperback and has been adapted to film. These factors combine to bring the Pulitzer Prize winner within both the budget and the wider circle of interest of many readers.
The novel is the third part of William Kennedy's Albany cycle. (The earlier books are Legs and Billy Phalen's Greatest Game.) Ironweed traces the return of a man to his hometown in 1937 after a twenty-year absence. Francis Phalen deserted his family after the accidental death of his infant son. He has spent two decades on the bum.
William Kennedy's gifts as a writer are apparent in the crafting of dialogue. (Kennedy also wrote the screenplay for the film, which offers crisp and arresting lines for Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.) The compressed conversation of Kennedy's ruined characters allow an unexpected impact from a phrase of no more than two or three words. Francis and his pal Rudy are together after Francis's visit to his son's grave (p. 20):
"Whatayou been up to?" Rudy asked. "You know somebody buried up there?"
"A little kid I used to know."
"A kid? What'd he do, die young?"
"Pretty young."
"What happened to him?"
"He fell."
"He fell where?"
"He fell on the floor."
"Hell I fall on the floor about twice a day and I ain't dead."
"That's what you think," Francis said.
Kennedy is attempting to trace the emotional struggles that unfold on the battleground of Francis Phalen's interior world. Francis encounters ghosts from his past - his dead son, men he has killed, his parents buried in the family plot - as well as his wife. These encounters focus on Francis's endeavor to understand the impulses that caused him to flee Albany and now to return.
Kennedy allows the dead son, Gerald, to articulate (p. 19) to the reader what is at stake for Francis. Gerald, through an act of silent will, imposed on his father the pressing obligation to perform his final acts of expiation for abandoning the family.
"You will not know, the child silently said, what these acts are until you have performed them all. And after you have performed them you will not understand that they are expiatory any more than you have understood all the other expiation that has kept you in such prolonged humiliation. Then, when these final acts are complete, you will stop trying to die because of me."
Kennedy is concerned that the reader gets the point early and read on for other reasons. What might these be? The awareness of guilt; the manner in which unknowing expiation occurs; the security that comes from well-deserved punishment, which is self-inflicted and certain.
Does expiation compel humiliation? Can expiation occur without understanding? Do the dead - whether family or martyred saints of God - whether family or martyred saints of God - rule the living? Are the dead entitled to exercise this power?
This review has been published in a collection of reviews and articles, That's What I'm Talking About (Nativa 2008).THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT
Rated by buyers -
This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for good reason. The hard luck tale of Francis Phelan is artfully written - sad, funny and inspiring. William Kennedy's imagery and insight on old Albany reveal a fascinating history that I had often felt just beneath the surface of the modern city. I breezed though this book quickly, in a trance.
Rated by buyers -
William Kennedy paints a picture with his words of a drunken, delusional bum who wants to do good in life, but keeps running from anything he can't solve with his fists or a pint. The story is almost entirely cerebral, with conflict being internal, but with a sprinkling of physical conflict that accentuates the character's dichotomous morality. A wonderful look at the confusing reality surrounding a man trying to make the best of the hole he dug and continues digging for himself.
Rated by buyers -
The opening paragraphs of this book quite literally took my breath away. I could not put this book down.
It has been reviewed beautifully here and I cannot add anything new to what has been written. This book should be on everyone's must read list, and in my opinion is one of the finest books written in the last century.
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