Roscoe Hardcover - 2002

by William Kennedy

You've never met a politician like Roscoe (or have you?)

Roscoe, the chivalrous warrior, turns his own life, and everybody else's, inside out to cope with the erupting disasters and finds fraudulence an extremely effective combat weapon. "Righteousness doesn't stand a chance against the imagination," he concludes. Every step forward leads Roscoe back to the past-to the early loss of his true love, his own peculiar heroics in the First World War, the takeover of city hall, the fight with FDR and Al Smith to elect a governor, and the methodical assassination of gangster Jack (Legs) Diamond.

Roscoe, William Kennedy's seventh novel in his Albany cycle, illuminates the high and low of Albany life between the world wars. It is an odyssey of great scope and linguistic verve, a deadly comic masterpiece from one of America's most important novelists.

"Kennedy's beguiling yarns are the kind of family myths embellished and retold across a kitchen table at night: whiskified, raunchy, darkly funny, tangles of old resentments and fresh exasperations." (Time )

"When Kennedy writes about Albany, New York, he is in fact holding up a mirror to all of American history . . . his fictional terrain can be compared to the Faulknerian South in its complex richness." (The Washington Post)

"Kennedy's power is such that the reader will follow him almost anywhere, to the edge of tragedy and back again to redemption." (The Wall Street Journal)