An Eyewitness to Paradox QUINN'S BOOK

By Paul Gray

Wherever they gather to raise their spirits, would-be writers and involuntary collectors of rejection slips invariably get around to the legend of William Kennedy. How his fourth novel came bouncing back from publishing houses 13 times, and how two of his earlier books, Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, seemed doomed to remain a dyad rather than parts of the trilogy their author had planned. Enter a deus ex machina in the person of Saul Bellow, a Nobel laureate, no less, who administered a scolding to those who had rebuffed Kennedy's manuscript and thereby inaugurated a streak of magic. When Ironweed finally appeared in 1983, it won a fistful of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, not to mention a sale to Hollywood for a big-budget adaptation (Jack Nicholson! Meryl Streep!). Meanwhile -- the narrative gets even better -- Kennedy, now 60, found himself the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship ($264,000 over five years), diverse other honors, and that peculiar American status,the long, drawn-out, overnight success.

One of the nice things about this story is that it happens to be true. But the inference that such a dream can materialize randomly for anyone with enough luck is certainly false. Kennedy's good fortune has had the perverse effect of overshadowing his talent, of making him seem a lottery winner rather than an artist who finally gained the attention he deserved. Hence his fifth novel arrives at an opportune moment, providing a respite from the hoopla of recognition and a chance to examine anew what all the noise is about.

Quinn's Book may at first prompt some head scratching, since it looks like a startling departure from the fiction that established Kennedy's reputation. As in his first four novels, the setting is Albany, but not the Prohibition dives and Depression-haunted back streets populated by the likes of Legs Diamond and drifting members of the Phelan family. This time out the year is 1849 and the narrative mode has changed from naturalistic to headlong melodramatic. In short order, an exotic singer and dancer named Magdalena Colon drowns while being ferried across the ice-clogged Hudson River en route from Albany to a theatrical engagement in Troy. The entertainer's body and the shivering form of her surviving niece Maud, 12, are fished out of the current and taken to the immense mansion of Hillegond Staats, a widow whose hospitality had regaled them before the accident.

Madness and miracles rapidly accrue. While the city suffers a number of freak disasters on "this day of hellfire and ice," Magdalena is chafed back to life by the indelicate and unnatural ministrations of John the Brawn, who pulled her out of the river. Then a hanged white man is discovered in a mausoleum on the mansion grounds, with a living black man shackled to his wrist. Next, a corpse buried some 70 years earlier is disinterred from this scene of fresh violence and removed to the house, where it promptly explodes.

The person who witnesses and reports all this is Daniel Quinn, an orphan approaching his 15th birthday who works for the roguish John the Brawn. This night is the making of Quinn and his book, for it is then that he falls helplessly in love with Maud and launches himself on the adventures that he will gradually learn to capture in words. "Quinn," he asks himself at one point, "when will you become wise, or even smart?" Quinn's Book provides the answer.

The picaresque formula of sending a young man out to be educated on the highways of life is as old as fiction, and Kennedy does not tamper with it. He makes no attempt to impose 20th century attitudes on 19th century happenings. The narrator describes himself: "Quinn experiences everything and concludes nothing. Tabula rasa ad infinitum." The garish, dramatic events Quinn observes hardly require embellishment. Befriended by Will Canaday, the editor of the Albany Chronicle, the boy sees a reporter dragged away from the newspaper by hoodlums who wish to stop his investigation of a vast secret organization called "The Society." Next comes a brutal street battle between native-born laborers and "the famine Irish," who have poured into the city seeking work. Quinn is canny enough to recognize in this mayhem a "historical moment in Albany, for it defined boundaries, escalated hatreds, and set laboring men of near equal dimension and common goal against each other." The boy learns that the Staats mansion, where he is a welcome guest, is also a station on the Underground Railroad.

Quinn provides, as it turns out, eyewitness accounts of a number of significant moments in American history. He covers Civil War battles for Horace Greeley's Tribune. He is in New York City when the 1863 Draft Riots break out and bears horrified witness to the torture and lynching of Joshua, a black man who had been his friend. Quinn's involvement in the public life of his times is counterbalanced by his private quest for the elusive Maud, who lives, like her aunt, in a world of glamour and make-believe. Visiting Maud in Saratoga, Quinn observes a parade of splendid carriages bearing their occupants to the races: "They are the American motley and they carry the motley-minded denizens of a nation at war and at play."

Quinn's Book successfully captures this dazzling, paradoxical panorama. In the past, Kennedy has excelled at revealing the dignity hidden within mean, pinched lives. This time he gives his characters plenty of elbowroom and lets them move toward folly or heroism. But the end result is the same: a novel that is both engrossing and eerily profound.