Books, Arts & Manners: William Kennedy Comes of Age

In The Ink Truck a character’s altered circumstances are accompanied by a new, if incongruous, image, and the phenomenon is described as a “sartorial mutation.” References to tailoring and its reciprocal power to “create” the man typify William Kennedy’s writing and imply a literal translation of Buffon’s dictum, “The style is the man himself.” Yet the phrase might also apply metaphorically to Kennedy’s development as a writer. This 57-yearold author, professor, and former newspaperman, who has a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Pulitzer, and a generous grant from the MacArthur Foundation to his credit, was virtually unknown until a few years ago. Kennedy had to wait for success; an examination of his five books reveals a talent that showed promise early, but matured late. He served his apprenticeship with his first three novels, emerging as a craftsman only with his fourth book, Ironweed, for which he received the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

The Ink Truck, Kennedy’s most atypical work, contains many of the elements that later became his trademark. In this first novel we are introduced, obliquely, to Albany, New York, and are initiated into a predominantly Irish(-American) world of unsuspected heroes, lost causes, and errant pookas. Here we see Kennedy’s first attempts to re-establish twentiethcentury man as a social being, inclined to congregate in coffeehouses and taverns. And through an outrageous protagonist we become aware of Kennedy’s understanding of character as an attribute of style, and the relevance of articles of clothing as extensions of one’s anatomy, as means of self-creation, as signs of kinetic existence:

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Loxley F. Nichols

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In The Ink Truck a character’s altered circumstances are accompanied by a new, if incongruous, image, and the phenomenon is described as a “sartorial mutation.” References to tailoring and its reciprocal power to “create” the man typify William Kennedy’s writing and imply a literal translation of Buffon’s dictum, “The style is the man himself.” Yet the phrase might also apply metaphorically to Kennedy’s development as a writer. This 57-yearold author, professor, and former newspaperman, who has a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Pulitzer, and a generous grant from the MacArthur Foundation to his credit, was virtually unknown until a few years ago. Kennedy had to wait for success; an examination of his five books reveals a talent that showed promise early, but matured late. He served his apprenticeship with his first three novels, emerging as a craftsman only with his fourth book, Ironweed, for which he received the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

The Ink Truck, Kennedy’s most atypical work, contains many of the elements that later became his trademark. In this first novel we are introduced, obliquely, to Albany, New York, and are initiated into a predominantly Irish(-American) world of unsuspected heroes, lost causes, and errant pookas. Here we see Kennedy’s first attempts to re-establish twentiethcentury man as a social being, inclined to congregate in coffeehouses and taverns. And through an outrageous protagonist we become aware of Kennedy’s understanding of character as an attribute of style, and the relevance of articles of clothing as extensions of one’s anatomy, as means of self-creation, as signs of kinetic existence: