'Chango's Beads'Masterful novel spans world, times

CHANGO'S BEADS AND TWO-TONE SHOES. By William Kennedy. Viking. 326 pages. $26.95.

Undeniably, some novels move to their own music, but few do so without losing that key bit of grace necessary for a song sung in that true and utterly unforgettable register: one that belongs to that particular book and no other.

From the first paragraph, the reader has a clue, but from the first page, it's established: Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy's "Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes" is just that type of work. Form and content are one and the same, and my, how good it sounds.

Another addition to Kennedy's "Albany Cycle" of novels, which includes such gems as "Phelan's Greatest Game" (1973) and "Ironweed" (1983), "Chango's Beads" moves from Albany to Havana and back again. Its masterful web connects sympathetic and singular characters, action and introspection, all across the seemingly impermeable borders of time and place, class and race.

Journalist Daniel Quinn, seeking a break from his present and a link to his grandfather's historically heroic past as a chronicler of great men and great events, travels to Cuba during the upswing of Castro's revolution and Batista's similarly brutal and bloody crackdown. True, Quinn parleys with Ernest Hemingway, even seconding a duel between Papa and an enraged Baltimore businessman, but he's in Havana and Santiago because he believes that, at the very least, "it's worth his time to bear witness to people living for something they think is worth dying for."

Yet the story also belongs equally to the beautiful Renata and her serial infidelity, to Tremont with his two-tone shoes, to Quinn's father, George, playful and suffering from dementia, to the equally brilliant and tragic jazz pianist Cody, to Father Matt and his commitment to the people and not politics and, perhaps most of all, to Albany.

Quinn's marriage to Renata and her flight from Cuba may take place offstage -- a novelistic jump of 11 years and thousands of miles -- but Kennedy weaves in their tragic but never doomed love so delicately as to appear as given fact, a continuous cycle that cannot but parallel the larger revolutions that are as much a part of their history as history proper.

"But you are not the story," Quinn reminds himself when writing up the series of epiphanic events he both witnessed and wandered through on the night of Bobby Kennedy's assassination. And William Kennedy, despite his brilliant verbal pyrotechnics and deceptively tight structural control, knows this, too: "Chango's Beads" is most definitely a gorgeous and rewarding read, but it's also a profoundly humane one.