Very Old Bones

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This return to the pleasures of Kennedy's Albany cycle ( Billy Phelan's Greatest Game ; Ironweed ; etc.) is especially welcome after the comparative disappointment of Quinn's Book . The Pulitzer Prize winner is back in form with a complex but beautifully shaped saga revolving around the elderly scapegrace artist Peter Phelan's unveiling of a masterly series of paintings based on a 19th-century family tragedy. The event takes place at a rare get-together of the scattered and embittered Phelan-Quinn clan. Ancient loves are remembered, old passions rekindled and touching but never cloying reconciliations won--all seen through the eyes of Orson Purcell, Peter's bastard son, a confused writer who has fallen more than once into madness. Kennedy's crisp Irish American dialogue is a joy; his characters, particularly the sardonic Billy, the ravaged and virginal Sarah and the solid but endlessly surprising Molly, are brilliantly realized; and Orson's bursts of madness bring vivid gleams of fantasy. Bones offers the rare pleasure of a novel written with high literary skill that is a sometimes moving, often funny and always persuasive read. First serial to Playboy and Esquire; BOMC and QPB alternates.

Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

"The past is the present," says O'Neill's Mary Tyrone in Long Days Journey Into Night , a theory that the Pulitzer Prize-winning Kennedy adheres to. In relating "this cautionary tale of diseased self contemplation," the author uses Orson Purcell, the bastard son of artist Peter Phelan, to carry on his Roman fleuve of Albany, New York's Phelan clan. Building his tale around a family gathering in 1958, Purcell relates his own life story as well as episodes in the history of each family member, both living and dead, who struggle to overcome their collective and individual pasts to embrace a brighter future. Though not a genuine masterpiece like Ironweed ( LJ 12/1/82), this book is still moving, sometimes bleak and difficult but often humorous, much like the lives of the Phelans themselves. The Phelans can claim a place beside O'Neill's Tyrones and Steinbeck's Joads as one of the premier families of American literature who endure and, one hopes, prevail. If you think the great books are no longer being written, reading William Kennedy will change your mind. Highly recommended.

- Michael Rogers, "Library Journal"

Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Kennedy's latest installment in the Albany cycle (Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed) continues the saga of the Phelan family in a familiar mix of surreal flourishes and gritty naturalism. Humor leavens the mix, but this one is still a grab- bag--a family chronicle that gets weighed down with too many attempts to sum up or recapitulate. It's written as a mock-memoir by Orson Purcell, ``a bit of a magician,'' who is the bastard son of Peter Phelan, older brother of Francis (Ironweed). Orson is attempting to put the humpty-dumpty of familial life together again during a climactic family gathering, in 1958, by chronicling his own life, his father's, and three past generations. Peter, a painter, returns to Albany (from a long exile in Greenwich Village) in 1954, and stays to document the family's history in paint and to care for brother Tommy, a sort of ``holy moron.'' The cast here is large and various: highlights include Francis, who returns in 1934 to attend a family funeral for matriarch Kathryn and nearly commits suicide, and Orson's own colorful interlude in Germany during the Korean War, where he meets Giselle (``I had never been more excited by a woman's body...'') and becomes a cardsharp. While some of this is thumbnail-thin, covering too much ground, Orson's narrative is finally a meditation on art, focused on father Peter, whose artistic cycle includes guilt, remorse, delight with remorse, self-destruction, boredom, and the resumption of art--``art again being the doorway into the emotional life....'' Orson's family saga, then, narrates and enlarges the pictorial one of his father: Kennedy's achievement is to place all of this into a comic structure that is, in the end, elegiac and celebratory. Tough-guy dialogue, hardheaded realism, flights of prose- -Kennedy's trademarks are here, but this one has the feel of a code: ``...we are never without our overcoats, however lice-ridden, of our ancestors.'' -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.