"Ironweed"—which refers to a tough-stemmed member of the sunflower family—recounts a few days in the life of an Albany skid-row bum, a former major-league third baseman with a talent for running, particularly running away, although his ambition now, at the height of the Depression, has been scaled down to the task of getting through the next 20 minutes or so.

The novel is rich in plot and dramatic tension, building as it eventually does, to a violent showdown between a gang of marauding American Legionnaires and a handful of derelicts in a hobo jungle. It is almost Joycean in the variety of rhetoric it uses to evoke the texture and sociology of Albany in the 1930's, particularly the city's Irish community, which by the time of the novel is in full control of the city's politics. And the book is remarkable in its refusal either to sentimentalize...