Myth is that dream element of both literature and life.'' The book is a coming-of-age novel of one Daniel Quinn, ``neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns'' - a first-person account of this cholera orphan who, in the course of becoming a Hearst-style reporter, witnesses some of the most vertiginous American history: the Civil War, Irish-immigrant gang wars, floods, fires, murders, and other mayhem including the races at Saratoga and itinerant theater performances. ``You can no more leave out myth than you can leave out a sense of place. ``I've always written this kind of book,'' he says. Kennedy is undeterred by such critical caballing. as a writer of historical fiction,'' other reviewers have done some public head-scratching, calling the mystical ``Quinn's Book'' full of ``intolerably baroque excess'' and ``make-work busyness.'' If the New York Times Book Review lauded Kennedy (on its coveted front page) as ``unparalleled among his contemporaries. Now, Kennedy has just weighed in with his first post-Ironweed work: ``Quinn's Book,'' a myth-laden, picaresque romp through 19th-century Albany that, despite the familiar geography, lies outside the author's usual historical realism canon, a departure that is proving problematic for critics. (Kennedy wrote the film version of ``Ironweed'' and a draft for Francis Coppola's fiasco, ``The Cotton Club.'') It is five years since the literary hosannas were first voiced, plus all the Hollywood hoopla. ``Well, I'm glad success has come now, rather than later,'' notes a wry Kennedy, enjoying some of the fruits of that long-in-coming success in his fireplaced suite in New York's Plaza Hotel. With the reissuing of his earlier books, ``Legs'' and ``Billy Phelan's Greatest Game,'' the historical trilogy of his hometown was complete and Kennedy was no longer the local starving writer but the de facto Bard of Albany. And he'd done it with unique - or at least overlooked - literary territory: Albany, N.Y.
After 30-plus years, Kennedy was not only in good company, he was in the big leagues. It was the kind of transformation - the decades-long overnight success story - seen in the careers of Anne Tyler, D.M. That's the tale behind William Kennedy's ``Ironweed,'' a novel whose publication earned for its then-unknown author all the right notices: the Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur ``genius'' grant, the big-budget movie adaptation. That is, until Nobel laureate Saul Bellow gave New York publishers a tongue-lashing that shamed the original house, Viking, into giving the book the green light and - more important - getting behind it. All of it duly recorded via ``Sixty Minutes.'' The 13 rejection slips for the fourth novel - the first three already out of print. Or at least legendary gossip about New York publishers.
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