Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game.

Recent radio: My first-ever appearance on the BS Report; today’s hit on our Seattle affiliate; yesterday’s hit on Mike and Mike in the Morning (complete with goofy custom song).

I’ll be on KTAR Phoenix tonight at 7:10 pm local time, and on ESPN 1000 in Chicago at 9:40 pm local time.

Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game is the second book in William Kennedy’s Albany cycle, which started with Legs (which I didn’t like) and continues with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed. Legs was a fictionalized story of bootlegger Legs Diamond’s rise and fall in the Albany underworld, but the use of a real person limited Kennedy’s ability to craft an actual plot, leaving him instead to fit his words around actual events. In Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Kennedy can create something from whole cloth – the story of the title character’s unwilling involvement in a major Albany kidnapping, his fall from grace, and his surprising redemption.

Although the setting is the 1930s, evoking thoughts of hard-boiled detective novels, Kennedy’s style is more expansive than the typical dry hard-boiled writer’s, from longer sentences to allusions to music, novels, and poetry, such as this passage where one character, a playwright, quotes Yeats:

Young people rode together in the summer in open carriages. They held hands and walked around the spectacular Moses fountain. Martin’s father stood at the edge of these visions, watching. This is no country for old men, his father said. I prefer, said Edward Daugherty, to be with the poet, a golden bird on a golden bough, singing of what is past.

The passage is a memory of Martin Daugherty, a friend of Billy’s and the second protagonist in two plot lines that intertwine throughout the book. Martin’s is more introspective and sentimental, while Billy’s has more action, relatively speaking, although the bulk of the big action takes place off-screen. Both characters face existential questions, revolving around family, both real and the constructed “family” of the McCall crime organization.

Kennedy’s prose is strong, and was markedly improved over that of Legs. He provides just enough imagery to set the scene and evokes that hard-boiled feel with text that’s one step above sparse. Billy Phelan’s also has more comic elements, and Kennedy is certainly not above a bit of slapstick or even bathroom humor, including the book’s funniest passage, one that has nothing to do with the main plot:

And Cottrell and Leonard and the mannequins in the window. Two bums broke that window one night, drunked up on zodiac juice, everybody’s bar dregs, beer, whiskey, wine, that old Lumberg kept in a can and then bottled and sold to the John bums for six bucks a gallon. When the cops caught up with the bums, one of them was dead and the other was screwing the mannequin through a hole cut in its crotch.

After fighting my way through Legs, I tore through this book, and was even satisfied by the unconventional (and slightly ironic) ending.

Next up: Back to the TIME 100 with Henry Green’s Loving, part of a three-book volume that includes his earlier novels Living and Party Going.