The next day, Francis takes another job, this time as an assistant to a ragman who collects discarded items. Before they can check into a hotel for the night, someone steals their money, leaving Francis and Helen to settle for separate and far-from-ideal sleeping conditions. After dinner, they visit a bar where Helen, who was a notable singer in her youth, performs a few numbers to great applause. The author describes these ghosts as matter-of-factly as anything else in the text, and Francis regularly converses with them, though only he can see them.įrancis finds Helen at a mission-run soup kitchen. Throughout the novel, ghosts from his past haunt him, including several men that Francis killed, accidentally or otherwise. His work over, Francis goes looking for his longtime girlfriend, Helen.

Narrated from an omniscient third-person perspective, the text reveals Francis’s grief-stricken thoughts as he visits the grave of his son, who died as an infant when Francis accidentally dropped him 22 years earlier, prompting Francis to leave his wife and remaining children. As the novel opens, Francis and his friend Rudy earn a few dollars by shoveling dirt in a cemetery in 1938 Albany, New York, Francis’s hometown to which he recently returned. The main action of Ironweed takes place over two days in the life of its 58-year-old protagonist, Francis Phelan, a onetime professional baseball player and family man who is now homeless.

Ironweed book review