Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

Starred review from August 22, 2011
Pulitzer Prize–winner Kennedy continues to chronicle his native Albany, N.Y., after a detour through Cuba, in his bracing new novel (after Roscoe). American journalist Daniel Quinn is in 1950s Havana reporting the revolution. In the Floridita bar, Ernest Hemingway introduces him to 23-year-old Cuban socialite Renata Otero, and Quinn is bewitched at first sight. An assassination attempt on Batista led by a group of revolutionaries that includes Renata’s lover lands her in hot water, but Quinn’s connections—both political and revolutionary—open doors for Renata that set her free and lead Quinn to Fidel’s secret Sierra Maestra camp. These heady days of revolution inform the novel’s second turbulent period—1968—and find Quinn back in Albany covering the machinations of the Democratic steamroller that is slowly crushing the capital’s largely black urban poor. Robert Kennedy has just been shot, and in the course of that day Quinn receives unexpected visitors from his past and documents the racial tension boiling over in Albany. Kennedy’s journalistic training is manifest in a clear, sure voice that swiftly guides the reader through a rich, multilayered, refreshingly old-school narrative. Thick with backroom deal making and sharp commentary on corruption, Kennedy’s novel describes a world he clearly knows, and through plenty of action, careful historical detail, and larger-than-life characters, he brilliantly brings it to life.

September 15, 2011
Kennedy (Roscoe, 2002, etc.), whose 1983 Albany-centered novel Ironwood won the Pulitzer Prize, returns to his upstate New York home turf with a side trip to Cuba in this decades-jumping novel about a journalist's less-than-objective brushes with history.

In 1936 Albany, 8-year-old Daniel Quinn hears Bing Crosby and a black man named Cody singing a duet with a borrowed piano in the house of a man named Alex, an experience that becomes a dream-like memory of musical and racial harmony. In 1957, Quinn is a fledgling journalist in Havana—Kennedy covered Cuba as a journalist himself—where Hemingway makes Quinn his second in a duel with an American tourist, the novel's version of comic relief. Through Hemingway, Quinn is hired by Max, the editor of The Havana Post, who happened to be present at the Bing-Cody duet. And Quinn falls in love with Renata, Max's ex-sister-in-law, a striking beauty involved with the anti-Batista movement. They quickly marry in part because the wedding gives them a legitimate excuse to travel into the mountains where Quinn hopes to find Fidel Castro. Quinn sets off for his interview, in which Fidel comes off as a philosophical tactician, but when he returns Renata has disappeared, probably taken by Batista goons. Cut to 1968, the day after Robert Kennedy is shot. Quinn is back in Albany, working as a reporter. Renata is back with him, but the marriage is floundering. With them live Daniel's father George, who is suffering from dementia, and Renata's niece (Max's daughter) Gloria, who has recently suffered a nervous breakdown. In love with Cody's son Roy, Gloria is also involved with her godfather Alex, now the corrupt mayor of Albany, where racial tensions are peaking. 

Full of larger-than-life characters, strong men and stronger women who marry personal passions to national events, Kennedy's novel has the mark of genius, yet a surfeit of names and plot threads discourage readers from fully engaging. 

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 15, 2011

Here's an unbeatable setup. Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur Fellow Kennedy, who gave us the great "Albany Cycle," puts journalist Daniel Quinn (not of his Quinn's Book) in the Floridita bar in 1957 Havana, where he meets Ernest Hemingway. It's the start of something good: a novel that runs from Cuba to race riots in Albany as Robert Kennedy's assassination looms. Kennedy's first in a decade should be pretty amazing; with a six-city tour.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2011
Kennedy, the Pulitzer Prizewinning bard of Albany, is back with a jazzy, seductive, historically anchored novel of politics and romance, race and revolution. Young Daniel Quinn awakens one night in 1936 to watch his amiable father, George, preside over a jam session involving Jimmy, a prominent black club owner; Cody, an exceptional black piano player; the future mayor of Albany; and Bing Crosby. Turn the page, and it's 1957. Quinn, now an impulsive and romantic newspaperman, is in Havana, drinking with Hemingway and falling hard for Renata, a rich and daring gunrunner of hyperventilating beauty and perpetual intensity and mystical need. The reporter and the femme-fatale revolutionary meet Castro and marry in a Santeria ceremony invoking Chang, the god of thunder. When next we see them, it's 1968 and racial tension in profoundly corrupt Albany is on the boil. Quinn and Renata tend to personal crises as Jimmy and Cody's civil-rights-activist sons and a rebel priest get caught up in the violence, and George, now senile but still charming, becomes the waltzing ghost of Albany past, positively Shakespearean in his munificent delusions. Music, rapid-fire dialogue, lyrical outrage, epic malfeasance, trampled idealism, and a bit of autobiography drive Kennedy's incandescent and enrapturing tale of the heroic and bloody quest for justice and equality and the gamble of love. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This gripping addition to Kennedy's celebrated Albany Cycle, which includes Ironweed (1983) and Roscoe (2002), is literary news of the highest order.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)