Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.PCS 1/10/84; site mtgzz.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!drutx!mtuxo!mtgzz!leeper
From: leeper@mtgzz.UUCP (m.r.leeper)
Newsgroups: net.books
Subject: LEGS by William Kennedy
Message-ID: <1486@mtgzz.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 18-Dec-85 09:42:05 EST
Article-I.D.: mtgzz.1486
Posted: Wed Dec 18 09:42:05 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 20-Dec-85 03:18:43 EST
Organization: AT&T Information Systems Labs, Holmdel NJ
Lines: 53


			   LEGS by William Kennedy
			    Penguin, 1983, $5.95.
		       A book review by Mark R. Leeper

     I rarely get around to reading a lot of what the mainstream considers
to be "good fiction."  I am not talking here about best sellers, though I
don't read many of those either, but about the stuff that the prestigious
magazines think is good fiction.  However, on vacation at Club Med, a
particularly sun-burned gentleman mentioned to me that he had just read and
enjoyed the Pulitzer-Prize-winning LEGS by William Kennedy.  This was a
novel about the gangster Legs Diamond.  After I got home I noticed the book
for sale and decided to give it a try.  For one thing, I have never read a
novel that won any prize more prestigious than a Hugo award.  Also, it would
give me an opportunity to research the actual character and put the novel in
an historical context.  Particularly good for this purpose are BLOODLETTERS
AND BADMEN by Jay Robert Nash and ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN CRIME by Carl
Sifakis.  I tend to go to these books after seeing a film like THE COTTON
CLUB or even GUNFIGHT AT THE OK CORRAL in order to find out more about
characters.

     The book seems to tale some liberties with the facts though in general
it is reasonably faithful to the facts about the character's late career.
The character tells his wife that his real name is John Thomas Diamond.  It
is odd she would marry him without already knowing his real name, but odder
still, she would know that his real name was John Thomas Noland.  Apparently
Kennedy did not even know Diamond's real name.

     The novel itself is told from the point of view of Marcus Gorman, a
young lawyer whom Diamond befriends and who allows himself to be pulled into
an association with Diamond that he knows will destroy his career plans.
Gorman is occasionally pulled into the plot but for much of the book he is
just observing Diamond's relationship with other gangsters (especially Dutch
Schultz), with the law, and with the two women in his life, his wife Alice
Kenny and his mistress, a dancer named Kiki Roberts.  This is not the kind
of book that really comes to any conclusions about Jack Diamond.  Diamond is
neither hero nor villain.  He is a selfish man who uses people from time to
time and rewards them at other times.  At the end of the novel we know a
little more about Diamond, though we still have not come to any real
understanding of the character.  If this is a story with a beginning, a
middle, and an end, it's almost all middle.  There is almost no beginning
and the end is flat, quick, and a letdown.

     It is difficult for me to see much greatness in the book and I am
unlikely to go on to read Kennedy's other two "Albany novels," BILLY
PHELAN'S GREATEST GAME and IRONWEED, but the combined experience of reading
the book and the background material in Nash and Sifakis was worthwhile.


					Mark R. Leeper
					...ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper