THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, May 22, 1996 TAG: 9605220039
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book review
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 76 lines
THE SIXTH installment of William Kennedy's acclaimed Albany cycle of novels, ``The Flaming Corsage,'' begins as a murder mystery that unravels, painfully and delicately, through the dissection of the flawed and ultimately doomed marriage of its central characters.
It is the best of Kennedy's work since ``Ironweed,'' the breakthrough third novel in the Albany tales, which earned him the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
This is flawless, seductive storytelling, where the writing flows so easily that it can lull the reader into forgetting just how rich the complexities of the plot and its players are.
Opening in a Manhattan hotel room with what the sensationalist press would dub ``The Love Nest Killings of 1908,'' Kennedy quickly moves back nearly a quarter of a century to the courtship of Edward Daugherty and Katrina Taylor. Daugherty is a son of Irish Catholic immigrants. Through a stroke of fortune, he is treated by a wealthy patron to a gentleman's upbringing and education.
But to the very Protestant and aristocratic Taylor family, no amount of polish can put an acceptable shine on Daugherty. They cannot dissuade their daughter from the marriage, but their acceptance of Daugherty as a son-in-law never rises above ill-disguised contempt.
Though he rises rapidly from reporter for his hometown paper to celebrated Broadway playwright, Daugherty is always, in their eyes, a shanty-Irish interloper.
Katrina's loyalties to the two families - and, indeed, to Daugherty himself - grow increasingly ambivalent. Her one immutable faith is a melancholy submission to the power and meaning of death. ``She was much in love with suffering,'' Daugherty says at one point, ``her own and others'.''
The couple's fate is cast one horrific night when Daugherty brings his wife's family together at a hotel dinner party in an attempt to buy the respect he had never been able to earn. A fire breaks out, and the emotional ashes it leaves will push Katrina into a deep, internalized madness. Events are set in motion that inexorably draw four characters, years later, to the scene of ``The Love Nest Murders.''
Katrina, who appeared as a background character in ``Ironweed,'' comes into focus in ``The Flaming Corsage'' as a soulful enigma. Here, using her diary as a mirror, she ponders an encounter, deshabille, with a longtime suitor:
``I sat and let him study me, giving him not my body, but the part of my soul that lives in shadow. . . . He stared at me and we didn't speak, but I felt glorious, basking in the light of my dear friend's wan smile. He stood up and took my chin in his right hand and kissed me just once, then said, `You are the vestal goddess of sublime pain.' ''
She is at least that. And she is the most intense and artfully drawn of Kennedy's characters since Francis Phelan, the protagonist of ``Ironweed.'' Katrina Taylor had a love affair with Phelan in that novel. He, in return, reappears in her novel in a supporting role. Daughtery first appeared in the second of the series, ``Billy Phelan's Greatest Game.''
This is a fine little device that Kennedy employs: Through the years, through the Albany novels, he has focused and faded the spotlight from one character to another. An innocuous neighbor in one novel might turn up as the protagonist in the next. Some, like Francis Phelan, never quite leave the stage.
Each of Kennedy's six Albany novels has a unique tone, from the gauzy phantasms that populate ``Ironweed'' to the straightforward, dialogue-heavy style of ``The Flaming Corsage.'' The stories drift in time from the late 1800s through the late 1950s, moving easily through the immigrant neighborhoods and centers of power, from the grand estates to the side-street poolrooms of a mature and uniquely American city.
Although characters recur and ancient story lines wax and wane, the Albany cycle need not be read in any special order. For new readers, ``The Flaming Corsage'' is as good a point as any to begin. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
BOOK REVIEW
``The Flaming Corsage''
Author: William Kennedy
Publisher: Viking. 209 pp.
Price: $23.95 by CNB