Review of "The Flaming Corsage" by William Kennedy

I can't remember what happened between me and William Kennedy. I really liked his books, and then I stopped reading them. This has sat on the shelf for twenty years unread. I had a feeling that I'd started it and hadn't liked it, but I don't remember actually doing that.

Anyway I read it, and it was great. It's set in Albany around the beginning of the C20th, and it tells the story of a talented Irish-descended man who makes it...into the educated, cultured Protestant elite. He ascends from journalism on a local paper to play writing, and he marries into wealth and privilege too. There's lots about sex, and relations between rich and poor, Catholic and Protestants, men and women. The plot is quite complex...towards the end I lost it a bit, even though I was still enjoying it. It's quite a complex narrative structure too, with some switches of time-period and of narrative form...some "found" material, including fragments of the character's plays, reviews and newspaper articles, and so on.

Anyway great, and good to have rediscovered Kennedy.