Word: truck
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These transmutants are so compellingly keen that Kiernan Rancilio, for one, forgot about playing with the motorized fire truck he received for his sixth birthday when he unwrapped his GoBots. "I felt so good when I saw them," says the Detroit youngster. "I carry them around everywhere...
...TRUCK by William Kennedy; Viking; 278pages...
...bonuses of such success is that a writer is virtually assured that anything he writes-or has written-will be published. The Ink Truck is Kennedy's first novel. Dial brought it out in 1969, a time when even the most unbuttoned fiction could not compete against reality. There was more than enough anarchy on the front pages, and few critics took notice of a book about a journalist's buffoonish terror tactics during a newspaper strike. Read then, The Ink Truck might easily have been mistaken for a political statement about the freedom-loving workers' battle...
...from experience. In 1963 Kennedy returned from Puerto Rico, where he had been managing editor of the English-language San Juan Star, to write features for the Albany Times-Union. He soon found himself walking a picket line as a member of the striking Newspaper Guild. In The Ink Truck, the real is bent into the surreal. Dingy neighborhoods are weirdly illuminated by arsonists' flames; alleys echo to pagan rites; Old World myths are superimposed on the present. There are elegiac hallucinations of the past and an up-to-date orgy, a perky sketch of a bare female torso...
Bloodied but unbudged, Bailey and a small cohort refuse to acknowledge that the strike is over. He harasses the Guildsmen, intimidates management and dreams of emptying a truck full of link outside the newspaper's offices. Dreams are in fact what Bailey is largely about: "A man could act on dreams as he acted upon thought. A man could act upon delusions as he acted upon dreams. They would have only a private validity. No one would be able to accept them; but neither could anyone negate them...