Odd fiction that has the ring of truth

By William Kennedy

Viking. 328 pp. $26.95

Kennedy is best known for the novels he has written set in his hometown of Albany, N.Y., and, sure enough, Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes starts off in Albany in 1936, when 8-year-old Daniel Quinn wakes up in the middle of the night to find Bing Crosby jamming downstairs for Daniel's father and some of his many acquaintances.

A mere seven pages later, though, the book takes a sharp and lengthy detour to Havana in 1957. Daniel Quinn is now a budding journalist, come to Cuba to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather and namesake, who had tracked down Maximo Gomez, the big-name Cuban revolutionary of his day. The big-name Cuban revolutionary at the moment, of course, is one Fidel Castro, and it gives away nothing to reveal that Quinn eventually gets to meet the Commandante. He also meets his future wife, the beautiful and mercurial Renata, and an Ernest Hemingway already on the skids.

Quinn thinks that what he's doing is "a continuation of an earlier life choice: to be a witness, a writer, something to do while he's dying that isn't boring. . . . He has a strong impulse to salvage history, which is so fragile, so prismatic, so easily twisted, so often lost and forgotten."

But the reader senses that Quinn already knows that raw fact comes up short when devoid of imagination. Quinn instinctively dramatizes whatever and whomever he encounters.

So it is not surprising to learn in the third section of the book that Quinn has in fact written a novel. That section, twice as long as the Havana section, takes place in 1968, on the night Bobby Kennedy is shot. It bears a certain resemblance to the "Circe" episode in Joyce's Ulysses.

Four "pilgrims" wander Albany as race riots break out. Chief among the four is Quinn's father, George, a former court employee and numbers runner. George suffers from dementia and serves as a slightly cracked Leopold Bloom, taking in the details of the day as Bloom does, but mixing the here and now with the past and gone.