Volume 39, Number 14 · August 13, 1992
Family Values
By Thomas R. Edwards
Very Old Bones
by William Kennedy
Viking, 292 pp., $22.00
The Evening Star
by Larry McMurtry
Simon and Schuster, 637 pp., $23.00
In making the case for restoring 'traditional family values,' politicians imply that there have always been 'traditional' families which were beneficial to their members, and that their supposed disappearance has created much of the misery observable all around us. William Kennedy's Very Old Bones is a family novel that puts this rhetoric in its place. The fourth of Kennedy's 'Albany novels,' it returns to the Phelan family of Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978) and Ironweed (1982). (The first book in the series, Legs [1975], does not have to do with the family.)
Review, 3099 words
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