James Kirkwood

I think it's about time I devote a blog to James Kirkwood, especially since I've began reading his novel There Must Be A Pony. I've read three of his novels; Good Times Bad Times, P.S. Your Cat is Dead, and Some Kind of Hero. Kirkwood is the author I like to brag about having "discovered," because whenever I mention his name invariably no one around will have ever heard of him, and most of his books are out of print and difficult to come by. But this is really me just being pretentious; while many people may not be able to produce his name, most people have heard of A Chorus Line, which he co-wrote. He also has a Tony award and Pulitzer prize for this play, but oddly enough I've never liked that particular play. Kirkwood's three novels I have read, though, are among my favorite books of all time.

Kirkwood's style is very reminiscent of The Catcher in the Rye, and in all of his books the characters are strikingly similar, and there are minor characters that appear in each books, tying them all together (Michael Chabon does this as well), or at least citing how they all happen in the same universe. Kirkwood's protagonists are always male, straightforward, and observant; but it's not gimmick-y, and it's more like he takes the same type of character and puts him into a completely different, bizarre situation. (In P.S. Your Cat is Dead, for example, Jimmy Zoole ties up a burglar who has broken into his house, and then spends the entire New Year's Eve with this man, playing tricks on their friends.) Kirkwood's characters are simply funny and likable, and one of my favorite passages in Good Times Bad Times is when Peter and his best friend, Jordan, are giving all the teacher's and other students at their school nicknames that they then refer to them by for the rest of the novel ("Casper" and "The Terrible Twins" are two examples) and Kirkwood books are the ones I cannot recommend enough. I actually prefer Good Times Bad Times to The Catcher in the Rye, and that's really saying something.

James Kirkwood definitely lived an interesting life, in that there's a lot of confusion on him. For example, I've read three different accounts (online, so take that for what it's worth) of how he died: one says he died from complications to AIDS, one said he had cancer, and the other said he committed suicide. He was also good friends with Clay Shaw, who was charged with conspiracy charges for the murder of John F. Kennedy. (He wasn't convicted.) Kirkwood used the events in a book called American Grotesque, which, just from the title and the cover, I want to read. At any rate, the moral of this is that everyone should read a Kirkwood book.