Books: Imaginative Necessities

IRON WEED by William Kennedy; Viking; 227 pages; $14.75

Writers tend to resent it when their work is labeled regional, and with good reason. The term, once honorably used in the U.S. to identify the literatures of a young and far-flung nation, has fallen on hard times. Thanks principally to the homogenizing effects of television and jet travel, regionalism now suggests narrowness and parochialism, a boondocks mentality afflicting authors too timid or dumb to make it in the big city. Such connotations are, of course, unfair; a novel set in Manhattan's East Side, for example, can be many times more provincial than a tale from the hills or the hollows. The question is one not of constricted locale but of the breadth and depth of a writer's vision.

It now turns out that Novelist William Kennedy, 54, has been a secret regionalist, in the best sense, for years. This discovery has been slow in coming because Kennedy disclosed his attachment to a single place, Albany, N.Y., only piecemeal. Legs (1975) was a mixture of facts and fiction concerning the latter days of Gangster Jack ("Legs") Diamond. Albany figured in this novel chiefly as the scene of the mobster's last grab for power and as the place where, on Dec. 18, 1931, his enemies finally put enough bullets in Diamond to kill him. In Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978), Kennedy returned to the 1930s and Albany, this time out of imaginative rather than factual necessity. This novel portrayed a fictional and vivid demimonde of conniving politicians, ward heelers, petty gamblers and barflies, all caught up in a bizarre kidnaping and extortion plot in the fall of 1938. One of the characters, Martin Daughtery, is a newspaperman who has chosen to work in the city where he was born: "His column was frequently reprinted nationally, but he chose not to syndicate it, fearing he would lose his strength, which was his Albany constituency . . ."

That description now seems autobiographical. For Daugherty's creator, another lifelong resident of Albany, has shown again how certain talents flourish best in native soil. Ironweed dovetails with its predecessor. The scene is still Albany, the time still 1938. It is Halloween, and Billy Phelan's father Francis is back in his old haunts, meeting ghosts and goblins from his scary past.

Francis is a bum and a lush. He would not be in Albany at all if the local Democratic machine were not offering deadbeats $5 for every time they register as voters. Francis does so 21 times before he gets caught and the politicians reneg. He now owes his lawyer, who once worked for Legs Diamond, $50 for getting him off on a technicality. That means looking for a job that will spring him from a place he can hardly bear to be.