With "Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes" (Viking, 328 pages, $26.95), Pulitzer-winning author William Kennedy adds to his celebrated Albany Cycle of novels, a career-long effort that uses recurring families and events mixed with historical realism to create what amounts to a fictional ethnography of his hometown. As a stand-alone story, this multiple-perspective narrative is action-packed but uneven, full of colorful characters but occasionally rudderless. The eighth novel in the cycle, "Chango's Beads" has its pleasures, but Kennedy never establishes the kind of thematic singularity -- as he did with his masterpiece, "Ironweed" -- that lifts it above its role as part of a larger whole.
The novel's focal character is Daniel Quinn, a young journalist who ventures to revolutionary Cuba, where he gleans wisdom from Hemingway and Castro and falls instantly in love with a fiery revolutionary beauty named Renata, whom he marries and takes home to Albany, N.Y. Flashing forward a decade, Daniel struggles to make his idealistic journalism meaningful in a city roiling with corruption and racial unrest. Side characters that flow in and out of Daniel's orbit include his wife's niece, Gloria, who's having an affair with the mayor; Cody, a dying musician from a dying era with one last show to give; Tremont, a wino with a heart of gold and a hot gun, and Gloria's father, Max, Renata's erstwhile lover, who is flush with drug cash.
Perhaps the most surprising and salient character whom Kennedy has chronicled here is George Quinn, Daniel's father, who is slipping into dementia. Kennedy's depiction of George's confused but soulful point of view is both stunning and poignant. While lost, George stumbles upon an apparent old flame, Vivian, and the two embark upon a night on the town buoyed by George's consistent attraction to a woman his dementia causes him to meet anew every few minutes.
The appearance of Hemingway early on in "Chango's Beads" is appropriate; the novel is told in a rat-a-tat, dialogue-heavy, no-nonsense, masculine way. When Kennedy does let fly with a literary flourish, he acquits himself well, as in this passage when Daniel is falling for Renata during a Santería ceremony in Cuba: "He is exploding with love for her; and immersed as he is in all this mumbo-jumbo, he would not be surprised to see his love materialize somewhere in this room in the shape of an idea, a corporeal rendering of his possibly insane desire."
But Daniel's love for Renata is shallow and doesn't propel the novel as does the damaged, impossible, temporary love of George and Vivian. Perhaps if Kennedy had immersed the reader even further into the fleeting beauty of the older couple's interaction, "Chango's Beads" would seem more distinctive and less like an installment in a series.
Cherie Parker is a book critic in Washington, D.C.
