The human condition

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.