Tired of Albany, Tired of Life

HEN A MAN is tired of London,” said Samuel Johnson, “he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” You could say the same about Paris, Rome, New York, or Chicago, and nobody would blink. But plug in Albany and you’ve got a laugh line. Yet William Kennedy did precisely that when, in O Albany!, he called himself “a person whose imagination has become fused with a single place, and in that place finds all the elements a man ever needs for the life of the soul.” In the nine novels of his Albany Cycle, which now includes Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, Kennedy proves that he means it.