Characters who aren't there dominate the William Kennedy novel Billy Phelan's Greatest Game: the missing father, the kidnapped son, the senile father, the lost infant. It is to the author's credit that these people take on a depth and life that is lacking in the out-front protagonists of many contemporary novels. The characters who are there, like Billy Phelan and the newspaperman Martin Daugherty, are positively gaudy. This is only partly due to Kennedy's skill with aphoristic dialogue. If that was all there was, this would be a pleasant entertainment in the Graham Greene mold. The deep political history provided (reminiscent of Faulkner in The Hamlet) and the excavation of family trauma (also Faulkner) bring this novel to a higher level. The addition of humor seems almost too much to ask, but it's there too.
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