The ML100 continues to depress! William Kennedy’s “Ironweed” tells the story of Francis Phelan, a homeless man who has been almost entirely consumed by guilt. Ultimately, it’s a story about redemption, but the reader has to slog through quite a lot of sadness and destruction (and ghosts) to get to it. There wouldn’t really be a story at all without that slogging, though, so I suppose that was the whole point. I wasn’t deeply touched by the story, but it wasn’t bad.

I’m still trying to work out on what merits the Modern Library chose their Top 100. So far, it seems to be closed-off characters and a heavy dose of long, rambling internal monologues.