Misery Loves Company

William Kennedy’s entropic novel, Ironweed, is a brutal look at the rampant vagrancy of Albany, New York, during the Great Depression. It is harsh, cold, and depressing. The protagonists, Francis Phelan and Helen Archer, are beleaguered by death: he digs graves at the local cemetery and reluctantly visits the grave of his infant son whom he dropped while drunk, she's sick, a friend has cancer, an acquaintance freezes to death in an alley and the body soon picked at by dogs, and visions of his past haunt Phelan, including the ghosts of two men he killed. A slim volume coming in at little over two hundred pages, Ironweed offers its readers dense, concentrated depression. Thankfully, its corrupting influence has been contained in a single book.

There are, however, great causes for concern: Jasper Fforde, in his recent Thursday Next series, has described the ability of literature to interact, and, according to the third law of thermodynamics, all matter and energy in the universe is evolving toward a state of inert uniformity. This means that, should too much mention of such an overwhelmingly gloomy figure as Francis Phelan be made, it would lead to the inevitable and steady deterioration of all literature and, by extension, all mankind. More troubling still is the possibility of two tragic figures meeting; the effects of Francis Phelan encountering another whose extraordinarily bad luck has brought him or her to rock bottom would be disastrous. For example, an encounter between Phelan and Willy Loman would certainly cause a tear in the space-time continuum.

Reading and discussion of such dark, complex works should not be attempted by casual bibliophiles; they should only be dealt with by trained professionals. Only in the institutions of higher learning, in whose hallowed halls impenetrable tapestries of pretension can be woven, can any safety from true contact with these novels be had.