Books like William Kennedy

Cornelius Suttree has abandoned a respectable life to inhabit a houseboat among Knoxville’s scavengers, drinkers, eccentrics, and doomed dreamers. Like Francis Phelan, he is both fugitive and penitent: a man whose self-exile cannot silence what he has left behind.

This is McCarthy at his most companionable—still capable of biblical grandeur, but also bawdy, tender, and extremely funny. His elaborate prose gives derelict streets and disreputable people an almost sacred radiance, much as Kennedy makes Albany’s discarded lives part of a larger moral universe. Many devoted McCarthy readers consider Suttree his warmest and most humane novel. To miss it is to miss one of American fiction’s great acts of fellowship with the outcast.

When an aging former boxer wanders into a Stockton gym and spars with a young beginner, each man glimpses a possible future in the other. From that modest encounter, Leonard Gardner builds a devastating novel about people who keep mistaking another chance for a new life.

Ironweed readers will recognize the unsentimental compassion: poverty is neither picturesque nor a lesson, failure does not confer nobility, and yet every small hope matters. Gardner’s lean sentences are far from Kennedy’s lush lyricism, but they achieve the same merciful exactness—the ability to show defeat without reducing a person to it. Gardner published no other novel, and Fat City’s endurance as a modern classic has only sharpened its singularity. Few books leave such a deep bruise with so little apparent force.

On the Day of the Dead in Mexico, Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, moves through a world transformed by drink, estrangement, memory, and intimations of judgment. The novel’s landscape is real, but also feverishly inward: signs, voices, and coincidences seem to accuse him wherever he turns.

That fusion of alcoholism, guilt, hallucination, and metaphysical dread makes Lowry’s masterpiece a profound companion to Ironweed. Both novels enter a damaged man’s consciousness without treating addiction as either an excuse or a spectacle; both find terrifying beauty in the mind’s efforts to evade what it knows. Under the Volcano is denser and more volcanic than Kennedy’s novel, its language gathering pressure until every ordinary object appears morally charged. Its reputation as one of the twentieth century’s great novels is earned sentence by sentence—and anyone haunted by Francis Phelan should meet Geoffrey Firmin.

Frank Skeffington, an aging mayor facing one more campaign, rules through favors, friendships, funerals, and an almost instinctive knowledge of his city. The kinship with Roscoe goes deeper than Irish-American machine politics: O’Connor likewise understands patronage as both corruption and community, a system sustained by genuine human bonds as well as cynical bargains.

The novel is wonderfully funny about reformers, newspapermen, ward bosses, and respectable hypocrites, yet Skeffington is never reduced to a lovable rogue. His gifts and failings spring from the same profound appetite for people. Long regarded as a classic American political novel, The Last Hurrah offers precisely the elegiac pleasure of watching an old political world disclose all its vitality as it begins to vanish.

If Roscoe’s greatest attraction was its fusion of political history with private guilt, this Pulitzer Prize winner is indispensable. Jack Burden works for the charismatic populist Willie Stark, but the novel’s real territory is Jack’s consciousness: his evasions, inherited secrets, erotic disappointments, and growing realization that no life can be detached from what came before it.

Warren writes with a rolling, incantatory force that can make a drive down a highway feel charged with fate. Politics becomes a test of whether good can emerge from compromised means, while historical research becomes a dangerous form of self-knowledge. Few American novels make power feel so physically exciting—or its moral consequences so inescapable.

Russo’s Pulitzer-winning novel replaces Albany’s political machine with a decaying Maine town dominated by one wealthy family, but it shares Kennedy’s gift for making an entire civic ecosystem breathe. At the center is Miles Roby, the decent, stalled manager of the Empire Grill, surrounded by ex-wives, priests, policemen, old classmates, failing businesses, and people who know far too much about one another.

Its comedy is quieter than Roscoe’s but just as humane: Russo notices vanity and foolishness without withdrawing affection. Gradually, the town’s economic decline, Miles’s family history, and his habit of surrendering his own desires reveal themselves as parts of one design. Empire Falls has inspired lasting devotion because its generous readability conceals formidable craft; by the end, a modest diner and its regulars seem to contain a whole American world.