Roscoe – William Kennedy, 2002 ★★★

Politics and the Art of the Lie

The only two sure things in life are death and taxes; that’s no less true for those who collect the taxes. 

William Kennedy takes a sympathetic look at a wheeler-dealer who ran one of America’s most powerful and longest-lived political machines while he takes on the prospect of his own mortality.

Roscoe Conway is the eminence behind the throne in Albany, New York. His father served as a three-term mayor until corruption charges forced him into comfortable exile. Roscoe himself has never held high elective office, and has no desire to, business being good enough from where he sits pulling the levers of the local Democratic party.

“As I am incapable of truth, so am I incapable of lying, which is, as all know, the secret of the truly successful politician,” he says in an opening sequence.

When pressed as to whether this means Roscoe is in fact a politician, he responds thusly: “I refuse to answer on grounds that it might degrade or incriminate me.”

But Roscoe’s life is not a cozy one, as it pans out in Roscoe. He is suffering from persistent health problems, which quickly turn serious enough to require medical care. Meanwhile, as the Republican state government investigates the Democratic-run city for corruption, Roscoe finds he has lost his desire for playing puppet-master. Elisha Fitzgibbon, a fellow Albany ringmaster and father of the city’s current mayor, turns up dead in his office late one night, apparently having ingested poison and leaving his old pal Roscoe to sort out why. Elisha’s widow Veronica happens to be Roscoe’s one great love, with whom Roscoe would dearly love to start again, if only he can help her win custody of her adopted son from her scheming sister Pamela – who also happens to be Roscoe’s ex-wife.

The layers of activity going on in Roscoe are dense and intricately interwoven. Kennedy had spent a quarter-century by the time of this novel’s publication filling in the details of Albany in a celebrated cycle of novels (Roscoe is the seventh of eight as of this post) and there are times the scenes he describes seem like notes from various passing carnivals rather than plot points of the story before us. Like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. to which Kennedy's Albany has often been compared, we find ourselves in a setting where the dead are as lively as the living and the past is not even the past.

Roscoe moves quickly from the custody battle and the suicide investigation into assorted other issues which all must be dealt with somehow by our title character. These include a pair of well-connected brothers, Bindy and Patsy McCall, who get sore at each other after a rigged cockfight, threatening Albany’s political apparatus in the process; a third-party candidate set up by Roscoe and his fellow Democrats as an opposition-dividing insurance policy against a Republican upset; and a muckracking newspaper editor who spurs the corpulent Roscoe into a rare act of violence, by implying something Roscoe takes deep offense at even though he knows it is true.

A long flashback piece deals with how Elisha was burned running for the Democratic party nomination for governor of New York State, with cameos from real-life figures like Al Smith and Jimmy Walker. It’s a colorful narrative, but like much of Roscoe has next-to-nothing to do with the title character or the immediate circumstances central to this novel.

Corruption is a running theme of the book, established early on as Roscoe remembers a speech by his disgraced father:

“How do you get the money, boy? If you run ‘em for office and they win you charge ‘em a year’s wages. Keep taxes low, but if you have to raise ‘em call it something else. The city can’t do without vice, so pinch the pimps and milk the madams.”

This is an attitude Roscoe has not only come to embrace, but carries to levels even the old man hadn’t quite imagined. This is made clear after that troublesome newspaper editor publishes a speculative item on Elisha’s death. Roscoe contemplates retaliation with his fellow power brokers, Bindy and Patsy McCall:

“Send a fire inspector down to that fire trap of his,” Bindy said. “Make him spend thirty grand to bring it up to code. He’ll come around.”

“Bad scene,” Roscoe said. “Harassing the press, and the patriotic press at that. There are other ways.”

“Name a few,” Patsy said.

“Take over his whole block. You did it with the whorehouses.”

“The whole block?”

“It’s a small block. Condemn one side to widen it for improved traffic flow, put in new sewer pipes. Pay Roy a quarter of what his building’s worth, settle sweet with the – what? – three, four other landlords? Then we own the block. When Roy is gone and we’ve got the property, cancel the project.”

“Condemn the block,” Patsy said. “Goddamn it, Roscoe, you are one twisted, beautiful sonofabitch.”

Something strange about Roscoe it took me a while to get used to is that Kennedy writes about corruption, at least as practiced here by Roscoe, not to condemn but rather to praise. As Roscoe comes to face the question of mortality, not only for his friend but ultimately himself, he realizes deceit and avarice are the only positive forces standing between him and oblivion in a meaningless world slipping from his aging grasp. (“What is the world coming to?” he is asked. “Less and less,” he answers.) Roscoe wants to leave political life for a quieter existence, but external threats must first be faced and conquered.

All is fair in the name of love: “Just keep remembering that the pursuit of love makes an ugly man handsome, a fat man thin, that love transforms shame into glory, and falsity in the truth,” Roscoe is told in one of several dream sequences which interrupt the narrative and, at times, infiltrate it, too. “And if you fail with love, your only consolation is food and drink.” Roscoe’s intake of food and drink has become so much that rekindling a lost love becomes his only survival strategy.

The real-life models of two central figures in Roscoe, Democratic party leader Daniel O'Connell (on the left) and Albany's mayor of 41 years, Erastus Corning 2^nd, who appear in the novel as Roscoe Conway and Alex Fitzgibbon, respectively. If O'Connell seems less than enthused with Fitzgibbon in this 1964 meeting, it makes sense after reading this book. [Image from www.timesunion.com.]

Too often, Roscoe gets lost in blind-alley storycraft like the escapades of Roscoe’s faithless girlfriend, Trish Cooney, or most especially a blow-up between two cops involved in the long-ago shooting of gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond, whose story was covered in one of Kennedy’s earlier Albany novels, Legs. These stories not only go nowhere and end improbably, but slow up the book with wise-guy patter designed to showcase Roscoe’s wit in motion, at the expense of clarity and reader engagement.

Told he speaks in riddles, Roscoe replies in Sphinx-like fashion: “The poetry of the giants, my boy. You see before you a transfiguration, a man so chastened by experience that he has shunted all his old faults into the brotherly grave. He is awash in mortification. He’s bought several new hair shirts, and he may even go to church.” It’s hard to like a guy who talks like that.

Roscoe works much better when it focuses on the title character’s relationship with Veronica, his attempt to uncover the mystery of her husband’s suicide, and his handling of the custody case. The character of the scheming Pamela, a bitter caricature of the designing female, cuts the liveliest figure in a book full of self-involved operators. The story of her four-day marriage to Roscoe, and how it didn’t survive the honeymoon, is hilariously bawdy and well-told. Seeing Roscoe figure out a plan of attack against her, and push it through a crooked courtroom, is the one chance a reader has to enjoy his machinations as much as Kennedy does. Kennedy gives these courtroom scenes a vibrancy and humor that make them stand out, charged as they are by the sort of straightforward melodrama that would play well on screen.

Elsewhere, Roscoe is more of a hit-or-miss reading experience. Limned with nostalgia, as well as Kennedy’s relativistic take on life and love, it lacks a clear handle, a sense of why Roscoe may be feeling disaffected by his life station, being as he is so much a creature of the game. “I’m paid for what I know about this town, and what I don’t know will eat my gizzard,” he says.

There is a vividly produced scene that takes place at a cockfight, suggesting a parallel to the games played by Roscoe and his peers. Kennedy spent time researching the sport, and details the many ways a cockfight can be manipulated to produce a desired result. But he also emphasizes the purity of the sport in suggesting this political parallel:

“To Roscoe, spectating at cockfights was a lifelong education in tension, cowardice, unpredictable reversals, and courage. The birds, bred for battle, fought for neither God nor glory, neither to eat nor for love. They fought to conquer the other, to impose death before it was imposed. Just like politics, Roscoe decided, but without the blood. Well, sometimes there’s blood.”

For Kennedy, that sums up both the tragedy and glory of big-time politics, the way it allows a man of means to fight his way to create his own reality. If that means goring someone else’s ox in the process, that’s alright. For Roscoe, we are led to understand in the end, is a romantic, who believes all is fair in the pursuit of love, even to the point of practicing deceit on behalf of the object of your affection. No one else’s claims to rightness are strong enough to stand in your way. If Kennedy senses there is something wrong with this attitude, it is not shared with the reader.

It’s a flaw of the book that Kennedy seems so won over by his protagonist not to worry this point, yet Roscoe does make you almost glad to overlook it as well. In the end, you are almost as convinced as he seems to be that politics practiced deceitfully is not the subversion of democracy as much as a triumph of the individual over an uncaring cosmos, a chance to implant one’s own reality, if only for a brief space of time:

“But truth is in the details, even when you invent the details. It was sweet the way true and fraudulent facts wrapped themselves around each other so sleekly. The next sentence is a lie. The preceding sentence is true. Which means the first sentence is a lie, and the second sentence is true, which means the first sentence is true and the second is a lie, which means the first was a lie again, or does it? A pair of impregnable truths. True-and-false equality, we call that.”

It’s the sort of casuistry used by morally suspect characters as old as the New Testament, but Kennedy in his uncritical way breathes fresh life into the idea. If not a transcendent work of art, Roscoe is a transportative one, an enjoyable trip even with the bumps along the way.