Magic Not-Quite-Realism

Quinn’s Book a novel by William Kennedy.  Penguin Books.  289 pp.  $16.00.

I don’t know quite what to make of Quinn’s Book, the fourth novel in William Kennedy’s Albany cycle.  I noted before that each of the first three books seemed more and more focused on a mystical Catholic view of things, with Ironweed taking a big leap, as Francis Phelan is able to see the dead and the narrator takes them seriously as characters, inhabiting their thoughts.  Quinn’s Book at first seems to go even more in that direction, when a woman who has drowned is brought back to life by an act of sexual intercourse (that didn’t seem to be the man’s purpose when he began; he was apparently part-necrophiliac).  That woman subsequently goes back to being a vaudeville/burlesque performer but interrupts her act to recount her near-death experience, and her niece—in many ways the most interesting character in the book, and Daniel Quinn’s primary love interest—is positively psychic, and eventually practices communicating with the dead.  It sounds as if we’re moved from Catholic mysticism to Theosophy..

But it doesn’t feel that way.  Despite these astounding events, the surrounding landscape seems just as harsh and realistic as the earlier novels, even more so.  We’re back in the 19^th century, tracing the Quinn family from its arrival on these shores, and the story seems fabulous, not unrealistic.  It seems more invented than the other novels, as if to recall an earlier time (when men were men, and the dead weren’t all that damn dead).  It’s part of the overall Phelan/Quinn saga.

Daniel Quinn is a young orphan, who watched his sister and two parents die of cholera but was somehow not infected himself.  He has become an apprentice on a riverboat, working for a man named John the Brawn.  In the middle of winter, with dangerous ice flows on the Hudson, a performer named Magdalena Colon (“whose presence turned men into spittling, masturbating pigs”) has vowed to cross the river, and found someone fool enough to take her.  A huge crowd of spectators, including a number of boatmen, have come to watch.  When her boat capsizes, John takes off to try to rescue her.  And Daniel has his first meeting with Magdalena, and more importantly, her niece Maud, who will become the love of his life.

John somehow knows one of the wealthiest people in Albany, a woman named Hillegond Staats, who despite her wealth is as altruistic and compassionate (and sexy) as anyone in literature, and John carts the corpse and traumatized niece to her place.  The scene that Daniel eventually happens on, when John is not only engaging in sex with a corpse, but indulging in a three-way with the corpse and Hillegond, somehow bringing Magdalena back to life, is a make-or-break scene for this novel.  If you keep reading at that point, you’re buying into a different kind of story.  We’re a long way from Legs.  But not only because I’ve admired Kennedy’s previous books, but also because the texture of this one is so entrancing, I continued, and would think anyone would.  I don’t quite believe what’s happening at the same time that I want to know what happens next.

Daniel is the proverbial person who, if he fell off a mountain, would find gold.  John the Brawn, who takes up with Magdalena (she owes him her life, after all), eventually abandons Daniel as he and the two women are heading off to another city to perform, but Daniel makes his way back to Albany, stumbles back to Hillegond’s house, and finds that the woman not only embraces him and allows him to stay there, but outfits him sumptuously and sends him off with various contacts to find a job.  The man Daniel has met in Albany whom he admires the most is Will Canaday, owner of the local newspaper and fierce defender of people’s liberties.  Daniel has an idea he’d like to get into newspaper work.

In that way, and perhaps that way only, he resembles his creator.

Kennedy’s book of nonfiction—Riding the Yellow Trolley Car—is dedicated to every journalist who has a novel manuscript buried in his desk drawer.  Kennedy once was that person, published journalism for many years and didn’t publish a novel until he was 41.  There is a scene in this book where Daniel discovers that he is a writer—he had been thinking of being a typesetter, starting off with some other kind of newspaper work—and it is my favorite moment, understated as it is.

“Quinn picks up his pen, dips it in his ink, and writes one sentence: ‘They call him John the Brawn and he doesn’t know enough to pull his head in when he shuts the window, but he knocked down the best fighter in the world,’ and having written that, puts down his pen, smiles, walks up and down the bedchamber, and understands that he has just changed his life.”

Quinn’s Book eventually wanders through much of the nineteenth century, as Quinn does indeed become a well-known journalist, especially a war reporter, and is present for many of the most important events of his day, including the draft riots that rocked New York city in the middle of the Civil War.  Young men were being drafted but could opt out if they would pay $300 instead, something the poor Irish of the city didn’t have a hope of doing.  They saw the war as an attempt to free black slaves who would then be competing for the low-paying jobs that they were able to get, so why would they want to free their competitors?  They had no interest in the war, certainly not in fighting in it.  The scene of draft riots is one of the most horrific in this or any of the other Kennedy novels.

And yet weirdly—this is another reason we have a feeling that were in the midst of a fable—the whole novel really just traces the love story of Daniel and Maud (in that way it reminds me of Love in the Time of Cholera, and Kennedy is a big fan of Garcia Marquez).  The same characters keep coming back; by the end Daniel is reconciled with John the Brawn, who at that point has not only knocked down the heavyweight champion of the world but is thinking about running for mayor of Albany.  Daniel is as comfortable in the company of the rich and the poor.  And Maud hasn’t changed her mind since the opening pages of the book.  Daniel is her man, and she will have him.  As the story ends, she does.

The End, as it used to say at the movies.  But who knows what happens next.