Francis Phelan is on the bum. In 1938, in Albany, New York, he wanders from place to place seeking nourishment and appeasement for the heavy guilts that plague him. The novel takes its title from the ironweed plant; a tough, resilient wildflower which significantly resembles the necessary mental and physical strength drawn upon by the desperately impoverished characters of William Kennedy’s Ironweed. Francis is perpetually on the run from his outbursts of lethal violence, running from family responsibilities and work and always toward drink. He returns to Albany, with his lady friend Helen and attempts to reconcile himself with his actions of the past.

Bodies in alleys, bodies in gutters, bodies anywhere, were part of his eternal landscape: a physical litany of the dead.

While working in a cemetery to cover outstanding law debts, Francis Phelan comes across his son’s grave – a son who at the age of 13 days, Francis accidentally dropped and killed. The cemetery is populated with the dead; not only in their graves but as lucid figures surrounding Francis. Gerald, his son, takes on a godlike presence in this world of the dead. Outside of the cemetery, these dead characters continue to figure prominently around Francis, he sees them, he speaks to them, he reflects on their demise and their lives, and his part in them. It is possible that these conversations and memories of the dearly departed are the rampant imagination and senseless rambling of a drunk, or the spectres of mental illness, or more likely, simply a literary device for the past and guilt. Nonetheless, these ghosts play such an integral role as Francis comes to terms with his often violent past.

Only the light had changed, brighter now, and with it grew Francis’s hatred of all fantasy, all insubstantiality. I am sick of you all, was his thought. I am sick of imagining what you became, what I might have become if I’d lived among you. I am sick of your melancholy histories, your sentimental pieties, you goddamned unchanging faces. I’d rather be dyin’ in the weeds than standin’ here lookin’ at you pinin’ away, like the dyin’ Jesus pinin’ for an end to it when he knew every stinkin’ thing that was gonna happen not only to himself but to everybody around him, and to all those that wasn’t even born yet. You ain’t nothin’ more than a photograph, you goddamn spooks. You ain’t real and I ain’t gonna be at your beck and call no more.
You’re all dead, and if you ain’t, you oughta be.
I’m the one is livin’. I’m the one puts you on the map.

The living characters equally occupy a hinterland between life and death. Life on the streets means existing inbetween human and animal nature. For the most part, the dead are more alive and influential than the living; the living and their dreams just as dead as those in buried in the ground. Take Oscar, an old bartender friend of Francis’:

And further, the attention that the bums, the swells, the waiters, were giving the man, proved that this drunk was not dead, not dying, but living an epilogue to a notable life. And yet, and yet … here he was, disguised behind a mustache, another cripple, his ancient, weary eyes revealing to Francis the scars of a blood brother, a man for whom life had been a promise unkept in spite of great success, a promise now and forever unkeepable. The man was singing a song that had grown old not from time but from wear. The song is frayed. The song is worn out.

Or Helen, constantly caught in a state between sleep and waking, until she too joins the legion of the dead:

What for weeks she had achieved in her time of rest was only an illustrated wakefulness that hovered at the edge of dream: angels rejoicing, multitudes kneeling before the Lamb, worms all, creating a great butterfly of angelic hair, Helen’s joyous vision.

After drifting back toward the family he abandoned, Francis begins to see himself as something of a warrior. He learns that his guilt is the only thing which is undeniably his, acting as his driving force, a necessity: his way of paying penitence for his mistakes was to avoid facing up to the responsibility of his actions. The ending seems overly sentimental, compared to the grime and desperation of most of the novel. Francis returns to the family, and they accept him with little reluctance, though this ending is not without sadness, as in doing so he loses the beautifully drawn Helen to death and his whimsical companion Rudy to violent thugs. The saccharine ending  jars somewhat with the aimless contemplative meanderings written in lyrical and original prose that came before, but does not completely undermine the powerful language, imagery and characters of Francis’s life lived on the run.

[A film version starring Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep and Tom Waits was released in 1987. The trailer, and the full film are available to watch on YouTube.]