William Kennedy’s Legs
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
is a bizarre novel; the first 56 chapters represent a complete work, a single story with a single protagonist and enough pseudo-intellectual pablum to make this Virginia Woolf hater want to light the book on fire. The last third of the book comprises interstitial chapters which may be added to the story proper if the reader wants to read the longer work. A few relate to the main narrative, a few more are of the newspaper-clipping style seen in a lot of other works, but most are just nonsense. The book is quite acclaimed – someone named C.D.B. Bryan is quoted as saying it’s his favorite novel, although why I’m supposed to take the opinion of a man with three initials in place of a first name seriously I have no idea – but it was a slog, and even slowed down towards the end. The core storyline is somewhat directionless, and doesn’t really conclude in any conventional sense; the main character needs a smack upside the head, both to get him to stop talking nonsense and to get him to do something with his life. The “freewheeling adventures” promised on the book’s jacket don’t even begin until the book is two-thirds finished, and they’re not freewheeling, not terribly adventurous, and are by and large extremely boring. (Exception: a bit of chapter 51, where the main character begins working at an asylum, a scene which sparks a few laughs.) So I wouldn’t exactly recommend this one.