Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

by William Kennedy

Imagine yourself in a large, gaily festoooned trolley car, yellow on the outside, bulging on the inside with people you figured you would never get to know in your lifetime - people like Louis Armstrong, Robert Penn Warren, Frank Sinatra, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jiggs and Maggie, Diane Sawyer, Paul McCartney, Saul Bellow, Samuel Beckett. Well, here you are, with Mr. Kennedy as your concerned host, taking you down the aisle of the trolley car and introducing you, one at a time, to those figures he has met or wirtten about over the past forty years: a master of fiction showing you how non-fiction can become a high art form, indeed. With the author of Ironweed and Very Old Bones, and his other fable Albany sagas, you are in very good hands. This rich collection contains Kennedy's insightful book reviews over the last thirty years on such authors as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Bernard Malamud, John O'Hara, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carolos Fuentes; literary essays on other authors and on his own writing; profiles of jazz musicians, movie stars, stories on the filming of Ironweed and The Cotton Club; and a moving soliloquy on the homeless that resonates with much force and timeliness today. Here also is Kenndy's illuminating unpublished interview with Robert Penn Warren, and his extended interview in Barcelona with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who also provided Kennedy with two original drawings that appear in this volume (along with some choice Kennedy family photos). This sumptuous gathering of William Kennedy's work reflects his credo about nonfiction: "I love it extremely well, I have worked in it all my writing life, and have enormous respect for its pitfalls and exotic reaches." You will preceive Kennedy's love of it all when you climb aboard the yellow trolley car.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

512 pages, Hardcover

First published May 5, 1993

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

William Joseph Kennedy is an American writer and journalist born and raised in Albany, New York. Many of his novels feature the interaction of members of the fictional Irish-American Phelan family, and make use of incidents of Albany's history and the supernatural.

Kennedy's works include The Ink Truck (1969), Legs (1975), Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978), Ironweed (1983, winner of 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; film, 1987), and Roscoe (2002).


See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_...

Reviews

[Gregory Koster · Rating 3 out of 5]

One unanswered puzzle William Kennedy’s RIDING THE YELLOW TROLLEY CAR brings up is this: how did a journeyman newspaperman with no money, no magazine journalism, no books published, no real star career prospects, manage to persuade the stunning (a ‘looker’ to use a word the 1950s Kennedy would have employed) rising Broadway star Dana Sosa to marry him, within a month of their first meeting? This is quite an achievement, and Kennedy takes care that his readers know it: on page 485 of the book he reproduces a luscious LOOK magazine cover with his lovely wife prominently, wetly, long-waterfall-of-jet-black-hair displayed, along with the caption that this cover sold more copies of any issue of LOOK except the one with the Kennedy family on it.
It’s a puzzle.
The rest of the book is 40 years of Kennedy’s journalism. If you are interested in Latin American fiction (I’m not), Section IV on ten Latin writers will be the highlight of the book. Even for me. the article on Gregory Rabassa, the stellar translator of so much Latin fiction, was interest. Kennedy does well at explaining how things work. He does not apply that talent nearly often enough in his nonfiction.
Another puzzle.
Kennedy’s attitudes are those of the conventional liberal from the 1960s on. He reads the New York TIMES, watches PBS, thinks busing is an answer to racial problems until it isn’t, hates Nixon (worst President ever), hates Reagan (worst President ever) and Bush I (tie for worst President ever---TROLLEY CAR was published in 1992.)
No puzzle there.
Thus, the literary criticism. His reviews of contemporary novels ca. 1968-1992 are dull reviews of ‘modern’ books i.e. novels that are too busy demonstrating that nothing means anything, anything means nothing, and don’t forget to ride the yellow trolley car that doesn’t exist(the title essay of the book is about Kennedy ‘seeing’ a yellow trolley car in Barcelona Spain, on his way to interview Gabriel Garcia Marquez---who tells Kennedy that the yellow trolley cars of Barcelona have not run for years.) Kennedy goes along with all of this buncombe, which isn’t surprising given his political views. What is surprising is that his comments on earlier unpolluted-by-modernism authors (Robert Penn Warren, Damon Runyon, John O’Hara, John Steinbeck, Frank Sullivan, Nathanael West) are appreciative, treating them fairly without denouncing them for not being modernist. This fairness extends to other cultural artifacts, the appreciation of the Jiggs cartoons for example.
Yet another puzzle.
What distinguishes this book and likely Kennedy’s work at large are the first and last sections. First section is autobiographical, how he became the writer he is. The last section is about Albany, the city environment that shaped him, strongly enough that he had to flee and try to forget the effects it had on him. This rebellion explains the puzzles Kennedy presents. Fleeing from Albany, and trying to shed its effects on him, he adopted the liberal bigotries of the 1960s. This adoption shows in his non-Albany, non-autobiography, writing, tedious stuff that he had to parrot to be a member of Lefty thought. When finally he made peace with his Albany roots, he bloomed. It is a mighty unusual writer who begins publishing in his early twenties, but can’t get a book published until he is 41. Even then, it took another ten years and a wholehearted embrace of Albany, and what it meant to him, for the work to come steadily.
The Albany and autobiographical parts are what make the book worth reading----once.

[Red Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best ironic anecdote is Kennedy noting that at a Joycean conference, a young Irishman suddenly rose up and told them, "I am an illegitimate grandson of James Joyce, and I want to tell you that he would spit on every one of you."

He did a nice profile of Hemingway, and included this section from Death in Afternoon about the bullfighter Ordonez - "A bullfighter can never see the work of art that he is making. He has no chance to correct it as a painter or a writer has...He can only feel it and hear the crowd's reaction to it...The public belonged to him now. He looked up at them and let them know, modestly but not humbly, that he knew it. He was happy that he owned them."

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Several very good pieces in here but Kennedy's review of Kotzwinkle's THE FAN MAN is 5 stars, man. Strange that Kennedy doesn't write about or mention Charles Fort...either here or in any of his Albany novels.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an above-average collection of book reviews, interviews, and other nonfiction by novelist and journalist Kennedy. His work here is often humorous, sometimes thought-provoking. My taste in literature is similar to his (though not an exact match) and the literary parts of this collection were the most interesting to me. His politics, however, are where the trouble comes. Kennedy is an old-time liberal and doesn't quite understand the problem of holding such views even though his family were working class (he has been well-off for decades). He is anti-feminist and often pokes fun at leftist positions while failing to take account of the shifting sands under his own political foundations.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of William kennedy's non fiction writing and it is simply exquisite.

[Beth Shields-Szostak]

1st edition, signed & inscribed by author