Here we have the eighth installment of William Kennedy’s popular and much-honored “Albany Cycle” of novels set in New York’s flamboyantly corrupt state capital. The cycle began in 1975 with “Legs,” based on the life of the mobster “Legs” Diamond. Its high point came in 1983 with the publication of “Ironweed,” for which Kennedy was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but Kennedy has maintained a high level of achievement throughout, deftly blending comedy and drama as, over the years, he has painted a portrait of a single city perhaps unique in American fiction.
“Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes,” like all its predecessors, is vivid and charming, but it also borders on the chaotic. Set in Cuba at the hour of Fidel Castro’s approach to power and in Albany in subsequent years — most particularly 1968, following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy — it has strongly autobiographical overtones that manage to give a certain shape to a tangled plot that at times borders on the incomprehensible. Daniel Quinn, its protagonist (and the grandson of the previous Daniel Quinn, protagonist of Kennedy’s 1988 novel, “Quinn’s Book”), is a journalist in Albany, as Kennedy once was, who in the first part of the novel is covering the Cuban revolution, as Kennedy did.
Kennedy, now in his 80s, is in the embrace of nostalgia as he looks back on the adventures of his youth, and this gives the novel much of its not inconsiderable appeal. The novel begins, after a brief cameo appearance by Bing Crosby, in Havana in March 1957, when the young Quinn goes to El Floridita, the famous Havana bar where Ernest Hemingway hung out, and musters the courage to approach the famous if totally over the hill novelist. I confess to finding the fictionalized Hemingway no more attractive than the real one, but the scene accomplishes the purpose of getting Quinn introduced to Renata Suárez Otero, a spectacularly beautiful woman with whom Quinn “had fallen in love before he’d said hello.” She “seemed as guileful as she was innocent,” and he is roped into her warm if dangerous embrace:
“She is a creature of perpetual intensity and mystical need, a nymph who could betray you in a blink with a stranger, if that act lit the flame that lights her days. You have an aberration wrapped into your life, Quinn, a walking, loving astonishment. Marry her quickly. She will understand your perception and will accept. Twice in the brief time you’ve known her she has admitted the possibility of marrying you someday, and she will accept now because of your persuasively absurd insistence. She is love insatiable but she has never accepted long life with her other lovers, who have all had the life expectancies of mayflies, products of her youthful misjudgment, her proclivity for fractured dreams, and her co-conspiracy in creating wrenching separations.”
Marry her Quinn indeed does, but for all her beauty she is a time bomb waiting to explode. Around her neck she wears the beads of Changó, “the warrior king of kings,” a “warrior who helps people in trouble” and, as Renata admits, “I am in trouble.” She has been hanging out with various opponents of Fulgencio Batista, the bottomlessly corrupt Cuban dictator who never gives a moment’s thought to knocking off anyone who gets in his way or merely seems to, and Renata qualifies. Too many of those whom she has loved or with whom she has been allied are dead — she “wears the dead like Changó’s beads,”Quinn tells her — and she is on the run.
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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