LIVING WITH THE ASHES

By R.Z. Sheppard

William Kennedy's new novel, The Flaming Corsage (Viking; 209 pages; $23.95), turns on two distantly related events. The first actually happened. In 1894 a fast-moving fire engulfed the Delavan House hotel in Albany, New York. Fifteen people died, mostly kitchen help and chambermaids trapped in top-floor workers' quarters later found to have sealed emergency exits. The second event is pure fiction by the author of such raffish and elegiac novels as Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game and Ironweed. In 1908 Giles Fitzroy, a prominent Albany physician, tracks his wife to a Manhattan hotel, where he finds her in the compromising company of an actress and a playwright named Edward Daugherty. Enraged and humiliated, Fitzroy shoots his wife to death, wounds Daugherty and kills himself.

Kennedy, the Faulkner of upstate New York, again draws inspiration from Albany, the hometown he once described as an "improbable city of political wizards, fearless ethnics, spectacular aristocrats, splendid nobodies, and underrated scoundrels." The aforementioned now rub elbows and knock heads in a novel that once more demonstrates the author's passion for place and his skill as a literary magician. How else should one describe a writer who moves effortlessly through time and who can summon ghostly characters from previous books to play full-blooded roles in his latest work?

Edward Daugherty is shown at the height of his powers in The Flaming Corsage, when his play of the same name scandalizes proper Albanians in 1912. In Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, set in the mid-1930s, Daugherty is forgotten and senile. Katrina Taylor, his lovely, highborn wife in the new novel, was evoked in Billy, as she was in Ironweed. The leading character of the Pulitzer-prizewinning Ironweed was an alcoholic ex-baseball player, Francis Phelan. In the new novel he is Katrina Daugherty's ardent young lover in 1898.

Such Kennediana can enhance appreciation of the author's world without end, but it is not required. Corsage is a self-contained tragicomedy realized in perfectly pitched prose that reveals some of the nobler and most of the baser elements in human nature. In the first of two parallel plots, a pair of practical jokes leads to the Love Nest killings. A second story line relates the daring courtship and tragic marriage of Edward and Katrina, who remarks, "It's quite uncanny what one sets in motion by being oneself." It's a point well taken throughout this tale of unforeseen consequences and fierce individualists.

Katrina is certainly one of them. Her decision in 1885 to marry the son of Irish Catholic immigrants is not popular with her distinguished Protestant parents. Nearly 10 years later, Daugherty is a successful dramatist still trying to win over his in-laws with expensive gifts and nights on the town. Like a choice table at the Delavan House on Dec. 30, 1894.

"Edward ... heard a great whooshing sound and in the same instant saw the elevator shaft fill with a sudden rocketlike uprush of flame and gas, a blazing cylinder made visible as the elevator door exploded outward, showering sparks and embers on all in the room, setting fires on the green felt of the pool tables, and hurling into the air blazing splinters and sticks, one of which pierced the breast of Katrina and instantly set her gown aflame."

Edward, like many of Kennedy's Celtic charmers, is tough and fireproof. He saves his wife but discovers that the disaster has transformed her into a perpetual mourner, a woman as cool and distant as a piece of Victorian cemetery statuary. In contrast, Edward defies fate with his art.

One of Kennedy's effective devices here is to insert scenes from Daugherty's autobiographical plays from the early years of the 20th century. In them Edward's love for Katrina survives above the wreckage of their marriage. In other lightly veiled dramatizations of his life, he lashes out at a former mistress who sleeps her way to silent-movie stardom. "Love is vertical," he writes. "You are relentlessly horizontal." Off the stage he confronts the novel's villain, an envious journalist and failed writer, with the killer line, "If your fiction was half as imaginative as your lies, you would have been famous years ago."

The type is undoubtedly familiar to Kennedy, a former newspaperman who has successfully transferred the virtues of clarity and concision to fiction. At just over 200 pages, The Flaming Corsage contains more dramatic events, bright dialogue and strong characters than most novels twice its length. The generous spirit is best reflected by Daugherty's dying father, who jauntily toasts his own send-off with a growler of ale and an intimation of paradise that, he says, resembles the inside of a fireman's boot. "That's not what heaven looks like," says his priest. "Then," replies the elder Daugherty, "I'm goin' someplace else." Fiction is full of men and women who can be larger than life. In his best novel so far, Kennedy gives us "splendid nobodies" who are larger than death.