Roscoe Owen Conway, the title character in Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy's latest work, is a man with a refined mind and a corrupt soul. A political player in the city of Albany, N.Y., in the years between the two world wars, Roscoe is an insider's insider, who, together with his longtime cronies in the city's Democratic political machine, deftly rigs primaries and elections, pays off crooked cops and judges, skims the profits from gambling, bootlegging, and prostitution — all in the name making sure his friends have whatever they need and his enemies get what they deserve. The fascination of Kennedy's Roscoe lies in how, as ruthless and unscrupulous as the title character's deceptions can be, a reader can almost always find him charming, principled (in his fashion) and sympathetic.
Over the past four decades, Kennedy, a former journalist, has been building a fictional world around the reality of Albany's past — an unlikely subject, perhaps, but no more than that of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County or James Joyce's Dublin. Roscoe is the seventh novel in Kennedy's "Albany Cycle," a series of books whose most notable entry is perhaps 1983's award-winning Ironweed, which had the additional distinction of being made into a movie starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. Kennedy excels at writing about the low, the poor, the corrupt, the desperate, the colorful people who beat in the tough Irish heart of the capital of New York, and he brings a profound wit and storytelling mastery to the texture and shape of his latest work.
Most fascinating is the strangely compelling way in which Roscoe repeatedly hustles a system he helped create and struggles to maintain control over. As a study in the nuances of political power, this novel provides great insight into any city with an ethically sketchy history. Ahem! We're looking in your direction, Tampa. But Roscoe is not just a fictionalized civics textbook for wannabe political players. At its core is a human story of a friend's suicide in the face of scandal, of a long unrequited love, of a family's tangled past, and of the bonds and betrayals of men and women who considered themselves soldiers-at-all-costs in the fight for helping their own people. If responsible citizens like yourself spend a little time with Roscoe, you'll likely find him wonderful company — but be careful, because by the time you reach the last page, Roscoe might just have stolen your vote.
—Mark Hayes
This article appears in Mar 6-12, 2002.