Swanny's ways

William Swanson, the reluctant hero of Katz's Florry of Washington Heights, living awkwardly in the 1990s, mysteriously begins to write the stories of the obsession that came on him in the 1960s when he suddenly remembered the murder of Florry and of the injustice he witnessed years before as a child. He seeks to reconcile the past and the Washington Heights of his youth with that neighborhood today. When he anonymously delivers these stories into the hands of his former gang nemesis/hero, Jack Ryan, the latter's careful, rationally structured life comes unglued. In this novel time folds into itself and compresses fantasy into reality, nudges the unknown into illumination, pushes narrative until it crumbles at its boundaries.