Don't let the title of William Kennedy's first novel mislead you. The Ink Truck has little to do with an ink truck; even the newspaper strike the truck symbolizes is only a framework for the wild obsessions of its central figure—a chap named Bailey, who tilts incessantly against windmills in lonely resistance to conformism. It is this character's comic recalcitrance that throbs through the book and makes it an extraordinary achievement.

Bailey is a loser of heroic dimensions. He has the irrational idealism of the Man of La Mancha, the life style of Jimmy Breslin, the indomitable bellicosity of a guerrilla fighter. An eloquent wild man of large intellect and larger spleen, he is the most intransigent of a tiny knot of diehard strikers, hapless remnants of a once-cocky Newspaper Guild local that walked out on the paper a year ago. In forlorn perseverance, they still go...