Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

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William Kennedy’s Albany cycle of novels, including the Pulitzer-prize-winning Ironweed, Quinn’s Book and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, are a fond but unsparing tribute to his rackety NY hometown. His latest addition to the canon mixes jazz and black radicalism in a narrative that spans three decades. A brief prologue sees a sleepy young boy wake up in Albany in 1936 to find two black men hauling a piano into the house so that his father’s friend Cody can serenade a man called Bingo. Except it’s not Bingo, but Bing Crosby and his haunting song (“Just because my color’s shady ... ”) which thread through the novel.

Jumping to Havana, 1957, the boy, Daniel Quinn, is now a journalist (as was Kennedy) hopeful of interviewing the rebel leader Castro. Instead, he falls in with Hemingway, a mean drunk haunting the Floridita bar, and also meets gun-runner and revolutionary Renata. Hemingway is challenged to a duel, insurrection against the rule of Fulgencio Batista breaks out, and passages of savage fighting are counterpointed by witty, staccato dialogue straight out of golden-era Hollywood.

Cut to Albany again, in June 1968. Bobby Kennedy has been shot but is not yet dead. Quinn, his confused father George, the estranged Renata, and Tremont (the black, alcoholic son of the man who lent the piano) weave through the unsettled city as black power protests over voting rights and political corruption swell to foment a race riot. The reader is left alone to tease out thematic connections between the episodes.

A fair amount of concentration is required. Kennedy’s cast is huge, his style impressionistic, his storytelling rarely linear. The world of jazz clubs and flophouses is well evoked, and present and past elide as Daniel’s father George remembers speakeasies, rackets and Big Jimmy, Tremont’s flamboyant father and unrepentant singer of “coon songs”. The full import of the prologue becomes clear, as black and white find common cause in music, shared history and the fight for civil rights.

Set against the menfolk, the female characters, largely whores and femmes fatales, lack depth. Renata may know how to smuggle people across borders, strip a gun, avoid wire-taps, negotiate with gangsters and stand up to torture, but she still doesn’t feel like a fully rounded character. Yet, there are enough bravura passages, pages of whip-cracking repartee and wonderful details in Kennedy’s lively narrative that this thinness can just about be forgiven.

Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, by William Kennedy, Simon & Schuster, RRP£16.99, 366 pages