I think it's fair to say that this sprawling novel (if a book of 291 pages can be said to sprawl), the seventh in William Kennedy's glorious Albany cycle, will not be to everyone's taste.

Asked to explain that "Saturday Night Live" comedian's link to Albany, Mr. Knoxville looked down and diffidently explained he had actually said "Billy Phelan," a principal character from the novelist William Kennedy's Albany cycle.

William Kennedy is the author of the Albany cycle of novels, the most recent of which is Roscoe.

So much William Kennedy's regular readers will already know, having pieced together this story's bones from the bits scattered throughout the five earlier novels of his Albany cycle, in particular "Billy Phelan's Greatest Game" and "Ironweed."

In the seventh novel of Kennedy's splendid Albany cycle, Roscoe Conway, heir to the city's three-time mayor, operator and fixer and finder of needful cash, runs out of zeal for politics and falls in love with another man's wife.

Is this, the seventh novel in William Kennedy's Albany cycle, a valedictory?

The sixth novel in the author's Albany cycle is a sort of excavation into the past of his own career as a writer, where the undoing of gloom and the reconciliation of family members are central themes.

Fiction continuing the author's Albany cycle.

The books of the Albany cycle are a testament to this ars poetica, books that live comfortably in their history, convincing and true.

The sixth novel in the author's Albany cycle is set 30 years earlier than the others, and concerns not the Phelans but the Daughertys, Edward and the mysterious Katrina.