The Family Phelan

Very Old Bones a novel by William Kennedy.  Viking.  292 pp.  $22.00

When we read Ironweed, about a man—Francis Phelan—who accidentally kills his infant son and then, in shame, becomes a hobo for the rest of his life; or Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, about that man’s son, who lives as a gambler and numbers writer who gets involved with gangsters and nearly loses everything; little do we know what a storied, colorful, and—to use a modern term—dysfunctional family they came from.  In Quinn’s Book, William Kennedy gave us their fabulous (as in, from a fable) 19^th century ancestors, but in Very Old Bones he gives us Francis Phelan’s actual progenitors, and the whole family he came from.  We like some of these people and hate others.  But we finally understand the situation a lot better.

Francis was the first son of Michael Phelan and Kathryn McIlhenny Phelan, who—like good Catholics of their generation—gave birth to as many children as they possibly could.  After Francis came Sarah, who eventually took over as the stern Catholic matriarch, actually worse than a nun; Charles—also known as Chickie—who made his family proud by accepting his calling as a priest then shamed them by returning to lay life, working for the local newspaper and eventually marrying and going away;  Peter, another rebel and home leaver, who moved away early, went to New York and eventually became a world-famous artist; Julia, who died young; Mary, who called herself Molly and had one major love in her life, but emerges as the sanest member of the family; and Thomas, an intellectually disabled man who stayed around the family house all his life.  Francis was Billy Phelans’ father, also had a daughter named Peg.  All of these people show up in the story eventually, and Kennedy provides a chronology at the front of the book so we can keep them straight.

The book is narrated by Orson Purcell, the illegitimate son of Peter, the Bohemian artist who lived in New York, and Claire Purcell, who for all intents and purposes was his wife, though he never married her.  Peter resolutely refused to admit that Orson was his child, though Claire insisted he was and though the young man lived with the two of them through most of his childhood.  Orson always regarded Peter as his father and was loyal to him, despite a fair amount of neglect and abuse.  Though Peter apparently became a great artist, he was a strange bird and a not terribly likable.  He made one grand gesture toward the end, but it didn’t make up for much.

At first the story seems to be Orson’s, who is 32 in 1956, the present moment of the story, but the novel ranges all over his life and the lives of the whole family.  Orson is a notably unreliable narrator because he is subject to a mental illness which is never specified; he may be bipolar or schizophrenic.  The most daring thing about Kennedy’s narrative is that he allows Orson to tell his story right through his fits of madness, so that at first we think we’re just in William Kennedy’s world of magic realism (Francis Phelan, in Ironweed, saw ghosts and talked to the dead) but eventually realize Kennedy is showing us what it’s like to be, literally, mad.  It’s terrifying.  We suffer through two such episodes with Orson.  They’re the most daring part of the story.

But the Phelan family began in paranoia and madness, when Malachi McIlhenny—the brother of Kathryn, the mother of this brood—went crazy and ritualistically murdered his wife, believing she was a witch.  That horrifying scene, which Kathryn was present for, marked her forever, and turned her into the devoutly stern Catholic matriarch which she eventually became.  Kathryn passed that role on to her celibate daughter Sarah, who was still beating the mentally disabled Tommy when he was an adult, eventually beat him so severely that she damaged his spine forever.  It drove Francis, and Peter, and Charles all away from her.  Only the women persisted.  And only Molly remained whole and sane.

There’s a scene at the end of this novel that reconciles everything.  It doesn’t make it all right, or make everyone happy (Billy Phelan, now almost 50, is still angry about the way his father was treated), but does eventually reconcile them, significantly, through art.  Peter Phelan, who has spent many years in obscurity, first achieved a bit of notoriety when he did a series of paintings about his brother Francis, and at the end of his life, after trying on a number of styles and finally returning to representational painting (he sounds like his creator) paints a series about Malachi McIlhenny murdering his wife, an event that has marked this family forever.  There’s no way anything can undo that, but art somehow transforms it.  We can’t see the paintings, of course—we hear descriptions of them—but this novel, penned by the unlikely Orson Purcell, does the same thing.  When you look hard at the story, and see everyone’s place in it, you realize not that everything is all right, but that it somehow had to happen.  The low points and high points are all of a piece.  That’s what great art can show.