The Flaming Corsage: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: love and madness
Review: Having first read Ironweed and Billy Phelan, The Flaming Corsage fit right into the mix. I found the structure a bit choppy but the story of Katrina, or is it the story of Edward's love of Katrina, to be most compelling.Every character, no matter how small, is as true as life itself. Tragedy, crime, class struggle, vengence, loss, carnality, and finally madness played out on a finely drawn historical background. I cried for them all.

Rating:
Summary: Um...better than some reviews would imply...
Review: I had to write something to counteract that unfair review by the gentleman from Switzerland. Is _The Flaming Corsage_ Kennedy's best? Nope (that w/b Very Old Bones, no contest). This isn't the first book to start with on Kennedy; since several characters show up from other books of Kennedy's Albany Cycle (Ironweed and Legs, I believe), it is helpful to read those first to get a better appreciation of some of the implied goings-on of this text; it certainly helps with the time-jumpyness of the story, which goes back and forth between the late 1800s and early 1900s, right before Francis Phelan drops the baby...in another book.

Kennedy has a natural gift for storytelling, but as my previous sentence might imply, there's a sort of neo-Faulknerian insularity in _Corsage_; it helps to know about the other novels Kennedy wrote, and maybe even Kennedy's own life as a budding playwright himself (interesting parallel btw. the play in this book, and Kennedy's own progress in getting his first play produced), before tackling this one; otherwise it may make for a fairly confusing 200 pages. But insiders would disagree with me on that. And that's my point.

Memo to Mr. Kennedy...when _Roscoe_ is finished, please, PLEASE come to Bellingham to promote your work!

Rating:
Summary: Great Writer Run Amuck
Review: William Kennedy is one of the best writers alive. Unfortunately, he is not one of the better story-tellers.

Once again set in Albany, this novel goes back into the 1880's to begin. We see young versions of some of the characters to arrive in Kennedy's other books. Unlike most of his other novels, politics and bootlegging do not play a big role.

The book starts as a love story between a young Irish man with some education and a beautiful upper crust old money girl. The characters are engaging, the writing wonderful and the dialogue terrific.

The novel then begins to go off the deep end. It seemed to me to cry out for an editor. Suddenly it became non-lineal without reason. Nor did the non-lineal aspect add a thing to it - it only made the plot difficult to follow.

By the end there has been a love triangle (told in snippets of retrospective) and a murder-suicide. As the main character/narrative slips into depression after the beautiful wife has died in a fire ending her life of quasi-madness he turns into crime solver and seeks retribution. If you had difficulty following that recap of the last fifth of the book, imagine when it is spread over 40 pages.

Kennedy's writing is superb. Unfortunately after the first half I began to hurry to the end. By the last portion I was shaking my head in wonderment that such a fine writer could have told a story so poorly.