I'm in something of a reading slump. The last two books I read were underwhelming. The one before that was ok, but had some big glaring problems that left me unsatisfied. Before that were there some good ones, but I'm reading at only a slightly maniacal pace lately, so it feels like it's been forever since I read something decent. In reality it's only been a little less than two weeks though.The Flaming Corsage didn't help break my slump of blahs. About a decade ago I read the first three novels in Kennedy's Albany cycle, and I liked them, not loved them, but liked them. Then I stopped reading further. Sometime, maybe around the same time I read the other novels, I found this book in the bargain section and bought it. Should I have not skipped books four and five in the very loosely connected novels? Was I lost by breaking the order the books were written in? By waiting about ten years to go back to the novels? I don't think so. And besides some critic blurbed on the cover said this is Kennedy's finest work since he won the Pulitzer Prize. That would lead me to believe that novels four and five in the series would be inferior to the one in my hand.A reviewer who really liked this novel and gave it five stars compared it loosely stylistically to Pynchon (as compared to his more straight-forward narrative style found in his other novels). I don't buy it, except that he does skip around in the story a bit and he does use a slight pastiche of literary forms to tell the story. But post-modernism or whatever you want to call this it is not. It's still pretty much a traditional story, told with a few literary curveballs (but by 1996 when this novel was released nothing in this novel would feel like it was out of place, even in the most straight-forward of realistic / mainstream literary fiction), but instead of feeling like they are pushing the way in which a novel can operate they feel kind of like a lazy way of filling in the narrative gaps. It wasn't like the novel was bad, it just didn't do much for me. I never felt like I got engaged in the story, and I tried my hardest to stay interested, and even refrained from reading the description of the novel on the back cover because I thought it might give too much away about the 'mystery' in the first chapter. Trying to create an artificial suspense didn't help though. There were some interesting things going on in the novel but the things that I found most interesting were sort of swept aside for the story that actually got told, or they were just alluded to later on and left up to me to fill in what I think was going on with a cryptic comment or two in the text. Now that I think of it the story, as it was told, could have been a good short story; and the textually subterranean aspects that I liked could have been incorporated in a better way in a longer novel that would have been satisfying, but the slap-dash manner that this 215 page novel was told in was too long for what it explicitly seemed to want to accomplish and too short to be engrossing. Actually, the novel is a fitting tribute to the “All-American City” Albany. It's ultimately unsatisfying but with the promise that it could have been something better.
Any attempt to fully explicate Kennedy's brilliance would require far more space than we are given here. Having now completed the 6 books (I've heard of a 7th and that he is working on an 8th) in the Albany Cycle, I can fairly say that the whole is one of the incomparable masterpieces of American Literature. What is ultimately shocking is that someone who seems more classically trained as a novelist has now done something that is more akin to Pynchon in structure. A minor character from a single incident in another book in the series is the main character in this novel, while the ostensible main character of the entire series is a footnote in this book. The events unfold rapidly, but the time frame is fractured and it is not the easiest 200 page read I have ever encountered. The power, however, is derived from the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, and I eagerly look forward to a time when I can read them all in sequence.
