Book review: What Becomes, by AL Kennedy

Published on Saturday 25 July 2009 13:18

WHAT BECOMES AL Kennedy Jonathan Cape, £16.99 Review: Claire Sawers

'FRAILTY and failure, they're charismatic," announces AL Kennedy midway through her latest collection of short stories, where she stops narrating and turns the spotlight back on herself for a moment. She is stepping briefly out of the shoes of married men, ex-squaddies and frightened nine-year-olds to explain the tools she uses to woo her reader when she is writing. "They have a kind of nakedness that charms."

If it wasn't so close to tacky self-promotion, something that just wouldn't sit right with a squirming genius such as herself, Alison Louise Kennedy could also have added comedy to her list of things that charm. Ditto honesty, empathy, grace and originality. The latest collection from the Dundee-born, Glasgow-based author, What Becomes, has them all in abundance, and achieves more powerful gut punches in its 217 pages than many novels manage in triple the length.

The book sleeve announces that the 12 stories are all set around the "moment of epiphany" for its cast of lovers, fighters, hopers and on-the-brink-of-divorcers. The epiphanies don't creep up where they might be expected though; a less imaginative writer might have scheduled these light bulb moments at a funeral or on a life-changing holiday for example. Instead they sneak up unannounced in the most everyday of places, midway through a gory dental appointment or noisy swimming pool visit, or flashing the answers to one of life's conundrums during a late-night game show on cable TV.

Just as her characters weren't expecting a time-delayed explosion to something horrible that happened 20 years ago, just as they slip into a relaxing flotation tank for the first time, the reader doesn't always see it coming either.

In Edinburgh, Peter is a dried-up misanthrope, trapped in the health food shop he owns but has grown to hate. His days are spent loathing customers or tolerating his flaky staff, whom he suspects of having "manual sex" with some of the exotic fruits. When the opportunity comes up to bond and eventually flirt with a customer over the organic vegetables, irreversible things start happening to his long-numbed feelings. Elsewhere, over a ketchup-smeared fried breakfast with her two young sons, a wife realises her husband probably won't return from his next business trip, knowing it is a thinly veiled escape from the marriage he has long lost interest in. More poignantly, in As God Made Us, a laddish group of amputee soldiers bring the horrors of war a little too close to home when they clash with a tightly wound schoolteacher on a day out with her pupils.

It is Kennedy's startling talent for drawing something tear-jerkingly blunt from something as banal as an overpriced Japanese dessert, or a pet hamster crawling up a jumper, that gives her writing its power. The sensation of panicked rodent paws and whiskers on skin becomes translated into "an adult kind of pleasure, complicated; anxiety and fun and loss of control and maybe the chance that I'd hurt it without meaning, or that it would hurt me."

While she distracts her reader with a casual observation about the carpet in a damp arthouse cinema, or sunlight "like a hole punched through to somewhere light", she is carefully arranging her props behind the scenes, ready to tug hard at heartstrings, or tickle fast on funnybones.

The humour, as ever, is ink-black and caustically good. Traces of her other career as an accomplished stand-up comic bleed brilliantly into her writing, often dabbing anaesthetic light relief in between the moments of heartache, longing or love that has turned stale. At one point, she comments that a poster for a lost dog announcing "Whole Family with Young Children Devastated" seems an annoyingly guilt-inducing piece of melodrama. "Why force me to know this?" gasps her female narrator. And why, she wonders, does no-one put up posters proclaiming "Found, exactly what we hoped for… we are so happy now"?

Flipping between light and dark as Kennedy does lets her writing seem at the same time informal but profound; casual and still full of revelation. It's the same trick that lets her poke fun at smarmy try-hards one minute, then carefully unravel the neuroses of someone else the next. From the cheek-suckingly uncomfortable scene that opens the book, where a cooking knife slips by accident, through the tender, bittersweet and laugh-out-loud vignettes that follow, Kennedy has produced another stunning, impressive and genuinely enjoyable collection, hard not to be charmed by.