The hardest thing about the advent of a new collection of stories by A. L. Kennedy — her fifth, called What Becomes — is the search for synonyms for ‘brilliant’. Her uncanny dialogue is as note-perfect as J. D. Salinger’s, her vision as astutely bleak as Alice Munro’s, and her ability to summon up a society in a few strokes rivals William Trevor’s. To these gifts, Kennedy adds a few twists all her own — a relish for the grotesque, sudden splashes of violence, and the kind of contagious, verging-on-hysteria laughter that attends final examinations, wakes and other emergencies.
Readers of Kennedy will find the terrain in this collection familiar. For those who are new to her, suffice it to say there are miserable marriages, abusive relationships and failures of health, business and humanity. There is bizarre behaviour — an adulterous couple whose relationship consists of watching the same stupefying television programmes, featuring psychics, wig sales- people and 24-hour news, while on the phone together; an apparently uxorious man who cuts his ring finger (‘a gash that almost woke the bone’) while making soup for his wife and ornaments an impressive amount of the kitchen with delicate patterns made by his blood. There are amputees, a woman with astoundingly troublesome teeth and more-or-less normal men and women. All of them want connection, a favourite Kennedy word, more than anything. Mostly, they don’t get it.
If this sounds grim, reading a few Kennedy stories is in order. Begin with ‘Sympathy’, an erotic tour de force conducted completely in dialogue. Seamlessly, the story of a one-night stand between strangers opens up into a compressed novel. The man and woman (their voices perfectly differentiated, as there are no ‘he saids’ or ‘she saids’) advance and retreat, gradually disclosing, through a night of sex, a loss for one and a lifetime of failure for the other. The man, in particular, is a nuanced combination of insecurity, selfishness and kindness whom you might expect to encounter in a novel, not a short story.
Then read ‘Whole Family with Young Children Devastated’, about a solitary woman who lives in a coastal town and worries about a missing-dog poster. The surprise ending will leave readers marvelling, ‘How did she do that?,’ and retracing her impeccable footprints. Kennedy is masterful at withholding information so you’re not even aware that anything is being withheld until, rapidly and deftly, she reveals all. In a telling detail, the woman imagines seeing a new poster, of the dog reunited with his family, with someone in the family ‘holding a newspaper with a date, tangible evidence that everything’s okay’. A typical Kennedy character, she trusts no one, and everything is very much not okay.
All the more reason for laughter. A sometime stand-up comedian, Kennedy is adept at a densely ironic male camaraderie; its appearance here in ‘As God Made Us’ and ‘Vanish’ is reminiscent of the mordant wit of Alfie and his RAF pals in Day, Kennedy’s last novel. And I defy anyone not to laugh at the fantasy, in ‘Saturday Teatime’, on the rumours about film stars and gerbils:
I don’t see how that would be entertaining, trying to put a rodent in your anus, and surely the animal wouldn’t cooperate. Or would you have it anaesthetised? Hypnotised? Trained? And you’d need a delivery system, some variety of piston, or at least a lubricated pipe … Or are there people you can call who’ll perform gerbil installations — professional and quick?
(And that’s only the beginning.)
In the most successful stories (including ‘As God Made Us’, ‘Another’ and ‘Wasps’), the plot speeds along, carrying the emotional freight of the main character swiftly; in the slower-going, less successful ones (‘Vanish’, ‘Confectioner’s Gold’), you can feel stymied inside a frail, mysterious psyche. Is there too much of a muchness in these stories of blasted hopes and fragile people? Ration them, one at a time at decent intervals, because even those about the most bizarre characters may strike you as surprisingly familiar, perhaps even remind you of yourself. q
Katherine Ashenburg’s Clean: An Unsanit- ised History is published by Profile Books.
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