Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today my guest is William Kennedy.

I'm very happy and honored to have him with me.

His new book is called Roscoe.

It's published by Viking.

It is the seventh novel in the Albany cycle.

Most readers know his Pulitzer Prize winning ironweed, but the other books in the cycle

include Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Quinn's book, Very Old Bones. Now, the fascinating thing about Roscoe is that he makes fraudulence attractive.

And one thinks at first, when reading the book, that it will be impossible for such a trait to be made attractive. And yet when he kneels down to talk to a young

boy who discovers that he hasn't known his father, he speaks such a special line of glarnie.

He makes it okay for this young boy not to know who he is. And you've sort of invented the man who can lie constantly

simply because he doesn't tell the truth, I've heard. He keeps telling everybody, I'm a fraud. I'm a liar,

and nobody believes him.

But he seems to be noble at the same time as he's a liar.

He lies to some extent, when he can, to the good.

He's always trying to save another person's face, it seems. Well, that struck me, you know, as the undercurrent of what I was discovering.

When I started this machine, working toward writing about this political machine, when I was a reporter.

...