Legs.

William Kennedy’s Legs, the first of his “Albany” novels (one of which, Ironweed , won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1984), is a fictionalized biography of the Prohibition-era bootlegger Jack “Legs” Diamond, using a number of other real people in Diamond’s orbit as characters to give a picture of the life and culture of upstate New York in the late 1920s and early 1930s. As a period piece, it’s very successful, but as a novel, it’s less so.

The novel opens with a discussion thirty-odd years after Diamond’s death, leading into a series of remembrances of Diamond’s life from his emergence as the main bootlegger in the Hudson Valley until his murder. Kennedy evokes the era by using the vernacular of the time and threading alcohol through every scene (did people drink more during Prohibition, or is that just in the literature of the time?), and I admit that I’m a sucker for books written in this time period. From Fitzgerald to Hammett and just about everything in between, I’m riveted by books about the Roaring Twenties and life under the Volstead Act, so I enjoyed Legs on a superficial level.

By posing as a biography, Legs loses something in the way of plot. Diamond is simply careening from one event to the next – a shooting, a trial, a tiff with his wife (Alice) or mistress (Kiki) – without any clear cohesiveness or upward trajectory to the story. Jack’s character doesn’t develop at all, nor does that of the narrator, Marcus, who remains as detached at the end of the book as he is at the beginning. It makes for an interesting read, but in the last few pages, I found myself wondering what the point was.

If there’s any point at all, it revolves around Marcus, who begins the novel as a successful lawyer on the rise in Albany circles, with an eye towards a career in state government. A chance encounter leads him to become Jack’s lawyer, and he becomes a consigliere to Jack up to the gangster’s death, all the while telling Jack he doesn’t want any part of this scheme or that plan while going along with them. Is Kennedy trying to tell us that we all have the capacity to talk ourselves into going along with something we know is wrong or is a bad idea? Is he detailing the journey of a man disaffected by success and society who looks for a more dangerous path to bring some excitement into his life? These feel like stretches to me, since neither theme is all that well explored with Marcus telling stories about Jack that often don’t directly involve him.

Next up: A brief nonfiction read, Amir Aczel’s The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World.