Ironweed

Rating:
Summary: A Work of Art
Review: William Kennedy's Ironweed is a skillfully crafted work of art. Billy Phelan is an often-drunk, murderous bully and, at other times, a very compassionate and generous person. This is not an unusual combination. He is running from mistakes of the past, and creating new problems along the way. Billy is an unlikely likeable character, and we want him to overcome the ruinous side of his personality.

The book successfully employs unusual literary devices and great metaphors. These literary devices include (1) the "living" dead in the cemetery, (2) the seemingly real ghosts that constantly haunt Billy Phelan, (3) temporary shift from past to conditional tense near the end of the book, and (4) the mixing of vivid memories into the current situation which tends to blur time and place.

Kennedy composes many haunting metaphors. Here's one: "Helen now sees the spoiled seed of a woman's barren dream: a seed that germinates and grows into a shapeless, windblown weed blossom of no value to anything, even its own species, for it produces no seed of its own; a mutation that grows only into the lovely day like all other wild things, and then withers, and perishes, and falls, and vanishes."

Rating:
Summary: Not quite shure about this one
Review: There is alote about this book that I question. I do feel that it is well writen and worth reading, but I do not feal that it is up to par with most classics. I would recomend it only if you have exausted maultiple list of classics and are still looking for somthing to read.
Now, the reasion I feel this way might just be that the book did not gel for me, and that might just be a personal thing. I do have a few comments to make though. If I were to change this book in any way it would be, odly enoguf, to make it longer. i feel that the epsodes in this book were so cluterd and short that after the book was over i felt that i had no real understanding of what the main characters life was realy like. It was like a 300 page condesation of The Grapes of Wrath. I think that mabey this could have been becouse his world was not a prison, but nonparticapentory existance. reading the other books in the series might also account for the breviety of this book, I havent read them, so I don't know. another problem was the setting, the first scene was so picturesk, but the rest of the book did not follow suite, mabey this was also for the same reasons as mentiond above, but who realy wants to read a book that captures somthing in the first few pages than denyes it's existance for the rest of the book. Even in writing this my opionion aboput this book has changed a million times, so just read it or somthing.
note: this would be a great book club book due to its length and the fact that a heated dicussion would result.

Rating:
Summary: An overrated weed?
Review: This is a highly evocative book of the life of a skid-row bum in 1930s America--in many ways one of the most evocative accounts of this type of experience I've read since Grapes of Wrath. And yet, I found the book ultimately disappointing. Francis Phelan's character fails to advance in a meaningful way; and thus, the story itself seems static. The story failed to pull me along, and I found myself strangely uninterested in the ultimate fates of the major characters. Part of the problem, I think, is that Phelan's character is a bit implausible. He is portrayed, in some ways, as too good to be true. It is hard to reconcile his altruistic behavior toward the deserving with his murderous past. I also found the sex scene with Katrina overwritten to the point of being incomprehensible. What does this mean, for instance: "Francis embraced Katrina, and shot into the her the impeccable blood of his first love, and she yielded up not a being, but a word: clemency."

Rating:
Summary: Hope for forgiveness, at the end of the road
Review: In "Ironweed", William Kennedy gives us an honest look at Depression-era homelessness, without either trivializing the hardship or glamorizing the dangers inherent in life on the road. There is not an iota of sappy sentiment in "Ironweed". In fact, the story of Francis Phelan, former third baseman for the Washington Senators, now a 58-year-old alcoholic bum, can be downright depressing, but not relentlessly so. Although Francis is living with the legacy of his lifetime of mistakes, big mistakes including three deaths and the specters of those he wronged in life, he somehow manages to maintain some measure of dignity and self respect, as do his king-of-the-road cronies. Francis, while flawed, symbolizes belief in the possibility of forgiveness and hope of redemption. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Jason Robards should get an Academy Award
Review: This is one of the great performances. Robards perfectly presents Kennedy's characters and beautiful prose, alternately blunt and lyrical.

This tape is an unforgettable experience.

Rating:
Summary: Depressing
Review: First of all, this book is well-written. Kennedy is very talented. However, the mood is bleak, depressing and one of desolation. It reminds me of the paintings by Edward Hopper, like "Nighthawks". That is my main criticism - the pointlessness of this character's life. Let me quote a sentence from the book just to give you the flavor: "...notable was his ability to understand...the slithy semaphores of the slugs and worms that moved above and through his earth." For me one book by this author is enough. ('slithy' isn't in my dictionary and I've only heard it in Lewis Carroll's poem 'Jabberwocky') Life has enough muck and mire as it is, thank you very much. In my mind, the book doesn't even begin to explain the mind of the skid-row bum. If it did, that would be an entirely different story.

Rating:
Summary: Post-Steinbeck squalor
Review: The most intriguing aspect about William Kennedy's "Ironweed" is that, for a novel about so many depressing characters, it somehow manages a cheerful, if not optimistic, mood without degenerating into sentimentality or contrived plot devices. It takes place in 1938 in the poor Irish neighborhoods of Albany, New York, still reeling from the Depression.

The protagonist is a 58-year-old bum named Francis Phelan. He didn't spend his whole adult life as a bum, though -- he used to be a third baseman for the Washington Senators, and a pretty good one at that. But a history of personal problems has brought him to his present station in life. It all started when, at twenty-one, he killed a scab trolley car conductor during a workers' strike, for which he was neither caught nor punished. Fifteen years later, his baby son died when he accidentally dropped him on the floor. Since then, he has been in self-imposed exile from his wife and his other two children, wandering around the country as a vagrant, a time in which he happened to kill another bum in a fight.

Eventually Francis returned to Albany where, destitute and homeless, he works at odd jobs like grave digging and junk hauling. He maintains a somewhat distant relationship with his family; even though they love and forgive him and would like him to be a part of their lives once again, his lingering guilt keeps him from fully reaching out to them. Adding to his guilt is the fact that the story of his crime at the trolley strike was the subject of a play by a local writer, whose melodramatic, manipulative seductress of a wife had been Francis's first love.

On the street, he drinks and hangs out with several other homeless friends, including a woman named Helen to whom promiscuity is a way to get a place to sleep on a cold night. Helen is an archetypal tragic figure; she came from an affluent family and was studying at Vassar to be a classical pianist when her father committed suicide, leaving insufficient funds for her to continue. Now, fattened and disfigured by a tumorous stomach, she drinks away her sorrows while waiting for death.

The chronological structure of the novel is fairly complex, made more so by Francis's common subconscious visions of ghosts from his past, where he tries to rationalize his actions. There are recurring motifs of junk and weeds, symbols of the uselessness and ugliness of the unpleasant lives these homeless people suffer or have brought upon themselves to suffer. Despite the overall bleakness, however, some of the characters almost seem to enjoy their lives, even if just to drink; they're inspirited by their fatalism. Likewise, Francis -- a poor, hardworking man who made a few mistakes in his life and is willing to do the right thing by his family, and also a sort of labor "hero" with regard to the trolley strike incident -- often reminded me of Tom Joad, making this novel a worthy successor to John Steinbeck's epics of the down-and-out.

Rating:
Summary: Masterful
Review: This book won a Pulitzer Prize and was ranked by the Modern Library as one of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th Century, and it is easy to understand why. It is a masterfully written story about an ex-baseball player (Francis Phelan) who has essentailly chosen (for reasons he is trying hard to understand) to become a bum. The location (Albany) and the era (the Depression year of 1938) are so vividly depicted that you are transported in time. The characterizations are extraordinarily sharp, and the tale is timeless. An excellent read.

Rating:
Summary: Even better than the movie!
Review: I initally read this one just because of the movie, wich I watched just for Tom Waits. I can't say enough, so I'll just say, Read It.

Rating:
Summary: A witty and philosophic novel to quench the reading thirst.
Review: In life, we all make mistakes, some more than others. People do not grow into faultless perfection. That is something that is done through hard work and deep thought, and even then, it is not fully achieved - much to our dismay. People sometimes unsuccessfully surrender themselves to their fantasies, their ideologies, and thus, make big mistakes, for to err is human. The protagonist in William Kennedy's Ironweed - Francis Phelan - is certainly no exception. He is a man who has made one too many mistakes. From the murdering of a scab, to his accidentally killing his son, to taking refuge in alcohol, to family abandonment, it becomes a grim picture of a life not worth living. All this stretches out before and beyond the Great Depression of 1929.

In youth, Francis had looks, health, vitality and a burgeoning baseball career that included such notables like Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker and Eddie Collins. But then it all disappeared to mediocrity and then into something even less than that. One would figure, like Job in the Bible, Francis would scream, "God, wht hast thou forsaken me?" He does not do that. In that respect, that is what makes this novel so refreshing. It does not evolve into a pity party, although the theme, plot and environment would lead a reader to think otherwise. Francis and his associates, specifically Helen Archer and Rudy, just propel themselves onward, despite or until mental and physical difficulities impede them. The characters don't whine or pout; they just deal with it. When the joys of life ebb away into that which we do not think we can handle, that's when the true self emerges, the thick skin manifests itself during adversity.

Despite what I have written, it is not all grim and tragic. Far from it. In darkness there is light, and that is especially true in the latter part of the book. The jocularity of the dialogue and semi jocund personalities of the characters give this novel an uplifting air of hope and possibility. And it makes one belive that no matter how dark our times may be, no matter how tragic our circumstances are, somewhere, in the far off distance, there is a gleaming ray of hope at the end of the tunnel.