Novels that combine reality and fantasy are not generally successful. Either the reality obtrudes to where the fantastic becomes merely ridiculous, or the fantasy dwarfs the real. But sometimes the combination works: richness of imagination does not get in the way of the storytelling. William Kennedy's first novel, The Ink Truck, is one of these happy few.

The Ink Truck is a work of the imagination, inventive, circular and multi-layered. Yet its characters are as real as they are symbolic, the scenes as much reality as fantasy. Normally, novels of great imaginative density, such as those of John Barth, are unreadable. As the reader sinks deeper into the author's stream of consciousness, the threads of the story unravel. Not so with The Ink Truck. Kennedy has been able to confine his wickedly surrealist imagination within a well-told tale. The result is a Dantesque journey through the hells of...