Billy Phelan's greatest game
By: William Kennedy.
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1983
Place of publication: New York, N.Y
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 282
Subjects: Kidnapping -- Fiction; Gamblers -- Fiction; Albany (N.Y.) -- Fiction
First sentence: Martin Daugherty, age fifty and now the scorekeeper, observed it all as Billy Phelan, working on a perfect game, walked with the arrogance of a young, untried eagle toward the ball return, scooped up his black, two-finger ball, tossed it like a juggler from right to left hand, then held it in his left palm, weightlessly. Billy rubbed his right palm and fingers on the hollow cone of chalk in the brass dish atop the ball rack, wiped off the excess with a pull-stroke of the towel. He faced the pins, eyed his spot down where the wood of the alley changed color, at a point seven boards in from the right edge. And then, looking to Martin like pure energy in shoes, he shuffled: left foot, right foot, left-right-left and slide, right hand pushing out, then back, like a pendulum, as he moved, wrist turning slightly at the back of the arc. His arm, pure control in shirtsleeves to Martin, swung forward, and the ball glided almost silently down the polished alley, rolled through the seventh board's darkness, curving minimally as it moved, curving more sharply as it neared the pins, and struck solidly between the headpin and the three pin, scattering all in a jamboree of spins and jigs.
"Attaway, Billy," said his backer, Morrie Berman, clapping twice. "Lotta mix, lotta mix."
Description: Billy Phelan's Greatest Game is the second in William Kennedy's brilliant cycle of novels (including Legs and Ironweed) set in Albany, New York. Billy Phelan, a slightly tarnished poker player, pool hustler, and small-time bookie, moves through the lurid nighttime glare of a tough Depression-era town. A resourceful man full of Irish pluck, Billy works the fringes of Albany sporting life with his own particular style and private code of honor until he finds himself in the dangerous position of potential go-between in the kidnapping of a political boss's son. In relating Billy's fall from underworld grace and his storybook redemption, Mr. Kennedy captures the seamy underside of a brassy, sweaty city that would prefer to pretend that the Depression doesn't exist.
Notes: "No one writing in America today has Kennedy's rich and fertile gift of gab; his pure verbal energy; his love of people."
—Doris Grumbach, Saturday Review