All the Rage by A.L. Kennedy

by A.L. Kennedy

A dozen sharp new stories by one of contemporary fiction's acknowledged masters A. L. Kennedy's latest collection of stories is an investigation of "certain types of threat and the odder edges of sweet things" - another intense and luscious feast of language from the author of The Blue Book and Paradise. "I want to describe my genuine circumstances on the occasion in question, but I can't," confesses the narrator of "Baby Blue," who finds herself "somewhere like a very big grocers . . . a supermarket full of sex." Kennedy hilariously explores the comic possibilities of fake genitalia before landing on a heartbreaking note. In "Takes You Home," a man tries to sell his apartment, the emptiness of the rooms. It's a journey to the interior that is both harrowing and humorous, as he considers the benefit of showing off the old kitchen rather than renovating - it "only quietly asks to be replaced and will shrug when it's knocked to pieces and hauled away and not take it personally one bit." Swarming with memory and moments of grace, All the Rage is Kennedy at her inimitable best.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literary Fiction, 21st Century, Contemporary, British Literature

Unknown Binding

First published February 8, 2014

About the author

Alison Louise Kennedy is a Scottish writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is known for a characteristically dark tone, a blending of realism and fantasy, and for her serious approach to her work. She occasionally contributes columns and reviews to UK and European newspapers including the fictional diary of her pet parrot named Charlie.

Reviews

[Karen· · Rating 5 out of 5]

A.L. Kennedy has a wicked sense of the absurd. She can be hilariously funny, but as she warned her audience at the Lit Cologne event I attended last Thursday, when her stories turn funny, it's like that bit in Jurassic Park where the children are eating ice cream: you just know that there are man-eating raptors advancing from stage left and right. The laughs are in there to relax the reader so that the contrast, when it comes, is all the more effective.

In the story Baby Blue , which is blue, but only for beginners, no real sex in there, just the toys that people might use if so inclined, or maybe it is an allusion to Bob Dylan? It's all over now? Anyway, there is a woman there who is lost. And cold. So she ducks into the nearest shop to get warm. Now, let's leave aside how likely this is for now, because these kinds of shops are usually highly recognizable, but as she wanders around what appears to be a big grocer's, trying to ignore the advances of an inopportune and over-zealous sales assistant, she gradually realizes that this is a supermarket full of sex. Or rather, not sex, but devices engineered - there was a lot of engineering - to mime the effects of sex. And as she stands in front of the fake vaginas the preposterous sales assistant in this preposterous shop asks the preposterous question For yourself?.

Just think about that for a moment. I mean we all know how we wonder about the kind of sub-text that might be going on, or might be seen to be going on, if we give something as innocuous as shower gel to a friend. Use this, please. So how much more delicate the excruciating coded message in giving a fake vagina to someone? What rich potential hidden agenda opens up there? Ms Kennedy goes into a riff that had me chortling alone on my sofa at home, and the audience in Cologne in gales of whooping laughter. And it goes on: after the fake vaginas, we get to the chocolate-flavoured condoms.

You like penises, you like chocolate, why not both?
There were many whys for not both. For many reasons, my opinion was in favour of not both.
If I like penises, might I not be assumed to hope the flavour of a penis will be penis, which is to say not too much of a flavour, ideally just this subtle, unflavoured pleasantness and that isn't a problem, how could that be a problem? I don't feel that my experience of oral sex is intended to be primarily culinary.

As the protagonist says: I am lost, but not that lost

A.L. Kennedy performed the whole sex shop extract on Thursday, which led on to a question from the presenter about how to write about sex. For three weeks each year, she teaches creative writing at Warwick University, and because, perhaps, of the boldness of her own writing, she tends to get from her students their attempts at the more physical aspects of love. So then we had the absurd situation of Ms Kennedy speaking on the pitfalls of portraying sex, whether on screen or in writing, in a church, which cracked her up herself - can't believe I'm talking about this in a church, and my mother a lay Methodist preacher and my father a church organist - an atheist church organist, but a church organist nonetheless.

However it would be wrong to leave you with the impression that A.L. Kennedy is a bundle of laughs all the way. Certainly not. The raptors are waiting.

In The Practice of Mercy , there is another woman, who, rather like the protagonist in Baby Blue has taken a trip away, to Europe, to a non-specific European town with 'sweetish Middle European air - a sense of mountains about it and of overpriced market-place snacks closer at hand'. The shops sell alarming artisan ceramics. Or lace. And contagious-looking biscuits.

On her way back she would buy some of the worrying biscuits. She briefly wished her phrasebook included the question, 'Excuse me, do these taste bizarre, or have a disturbing texture, in which case I'll take several?'

That would be the right thing to expect with A.L. Kennedy. Stories that taste bizarre, have a disturbing texture, (but I'll take several.) She is not an easy, comfortable writer, these are not stories that you can shrug on like an old coat. The writing is often spiky, cryptic, prickly. Each word weighed, carefully, in the hand, examined, questioned, then rejected. Nothing is easy, breezy, peasy. In A Thing Unheard-of , someone, 'you', is debating how to ask someone, 'they', to leave. The meticulous, painstaking examination of each word and its implications is symptomatic of Kennedy's work:

How are you?
What does that mean?
What are the implications?
You're a person who weighs implications and so are they, and that's a factor to consider while you plan.

Scrupulous. That's the word.

And small, small, small. These stories are all about love. The fragility of it, the pain of losing it, the absurdity of it, the gentle healing capacity of it, the wonder of it. Sometimes there is a glimpse of the outer world as opposed to the inner: In The Effects of Good Government on the City for example, the outer world intrudes sporadically, disturbingly, in the form of the trauma experienced by a female soldier who was witness to some of the necessary evil in terrorist suspect internment camps. In the title story too, there are demos and kettling and a self-satisfied journalist who betrays his best self when he betrays his Emily. But mostly the field she ploughs is a very small one, about the size of the human heart.

Sometimes I would love her to let go a little. But I suppose you can't have both: Scrupulous is never going to be relaxed.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The real experience of love is having unreasonably lost all shelter(…)you cling to whoever is with you for sheer safety, beyond anything else. You cling to whoever has robbed you and they cling back because they are equally naked – you have stripped them to their blood. They are your responsibility, frail and skinless. It can't be helped."

I've finished this wonderful collection of stories two weeks ago, and they still linger, haven't left me one bit, so here's me changing my initial rating to five stars.

One thing I've always loved about A.L. Kennedy is her voice, her distinct language. It's not for everyone maybe. But it's unmistakeably hers.
Knowing that she's a writer as well as a stand-up comedian, it comes as no surprise to find that she's extremely funny, heartbreakingly so. However, with her incredible eye for surreal detail, for brilliantly dry and often drastic dialog she'll sometimes, without warning, let her stories shift into poetry and into sentences you'd want to fill your notebooks with, or your diary, or your tombstone and swear they came from the depths of your own gut (just that your own gut wasn't quite as eloquent)

They are stories filled with awkward, somewhat wounded figures and they all circle the central theme of love. It has to be said: Pink isn't Kennedy's color. Those stories are a rather bleak and sometimes feel as if watching the bare bones of love on a dissection table, plus the wounds one might catch whilst unflinchingly parading what the blurb calls "the battlefield of the heart", both in anatomical precision. You might want a tissue handy. But you might also want to prepare yourself for real beauty in those often opaque stories, that reveal themselves in layers. Oh and: be prepared to not feel embarrassed when laughing out loud whilst on public transport.

[Crystal · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF after the story of the middle-aged man having an affair with a younger woman. Reading his thoughts as he treated her terribly and couldn't even talk himself into seeing her as a three-dimensional person was offputting. It was bad enough that one of the previous stories was about another middle-aged man sleeping with one of his housekeepers (or secretary?). Not in the mood to read about older men sexually taking advantage of vulnerable people, especially when they're bog-standard stories.

[Thom · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are two voices in AL Kennedy’s writing – the miserablist author, and the stand-up comic. In All the Rage, her latest collection of short stories, the comic is in fine form but maybe the author is too downbeat for her own good. She can skilfully pick apart the ridiculous aspects of modern life which we take for granted – the Santa Dash, the patter of a sex shop sales assistant – but she is too detached from the lives she describes, her resolutely third-person narratives a way of keeping her characters at arm’s length.

The way her comic observations stand out from her more thoughtful passages of prose made me think that Kennedy would be a great flash fiction writer. ‘Baby Blue’, for example, is frustratingly vague and impersonal, until its protagonist somehow arrives in a female-friendly sex shop. The difference in the writing is marked; Kennedy is wickedly funny describing the ‘more or less sci-fi imitation penises’ and chocolate condoms (‘I don’t feel my experience of oral sex is intended to be primarily culinary’). ‘The Practice of Mercy’ has a similar passage in which Kennedy ruminates on hotel breakfasts, lamenting the way that hash browns and bacon, those ‘customary Anglo-American harbingers of obesity and doom’ have replaced the ‘mysterious’ continental breakfasts with their ‘plates of unnameable meats and pure, wild colours in jars’. The problem is that I can’t really remember anything else that happened in either story.

The stories here mainly concern damaging love affairs, or damaged lovers, and at times there is a sensual tone to Kennedy’s writing. ‘Late in Life’ opens with a woman eating a fig, ‘destroying it in an affectionate way’. Later, a character craves ‘the potentially fraudulent kiss of fresh hotel sheets along limbs’. All too often, though, she retreats into frosty detachment, in which inanimate objects seem infused with more human qualities than her characters.

From time to time Kennedy manages to combine her acerbic observations with more reflective passages to good effect, as in the title story, which describes a journey disrupted by delay and a change of trains at an unfamiliar rural station as a form of purgatory (one which will be familiar to anyone who has to use Northern Rail on a regular basis). The protagonist, a tabloid journalist, is stranded on the platform with his wife, but still seeks out opportunities to cast his predatory gaze over the other passengers. Kennedy describes his tempestuous marriage with relish (‘there was something about kissing her while she tasted of contempt… you had to be careful in these areas, and he wouldn’t recommend it for someone who flagged under tension, but if you could stand it…’), but for the most part his thoughts are taken up with memories of a younger woman with whom he had enjoyed a protracted affair. The amount of time he spends thinking about these women is contrasted with the hasty and brutal reductionism of his work – ‘urgent copy to go with urgent tits… this week’s tits were wronged, glazed with anguish’. The high point of this story concerns the journalist’s farcical attempt to attend a demonstration with his young lover, but unfortunately the narrative afterwards trails off into recriminations.

The opening story, ‘Late in Life’, is touching and witty. A middle-aged woman prepares to go into town with her older lover, who will pay off her mortgage, a prelude to moving in together. She is energised by the prospect of freedom from her financial obligations, determined to ‘undermine the calm of her nearest building society branch with an outbreak of sex, or something like it’, but is dismayed at the lethargy of the people around her, the student ‘of the wandering sort’ who ‘shuffles past, his business concluded. He seems exactly as bewildered as he did when he drifted up to make his enquiry’. These delays allow her mind to wander, thinking of her lover’s closeness to death, and the temporary nature of her happiness. Here, the writing is tight and the situation definite, with none of the drift that creeps in elsewhere.

There’s plenty to admire in the stories I’ve mentioned above, which are insightful, witty and melancholy at once. But who could ever love a story which begins with the line ‘the thing is, you know they’ll be thinking much the same’, as ‘A Thing Unheard-of’ does? This vague set-up is unfortunately the default setting for too many of the stories here, and the cumulative effect of them drains the life from the collection. When describing her characters, Kennedy’s writing becomes blurry, impersonal, lacking emotional resonance – a sad contrast to the sharpness of her observations.

[J · Rating 2 out of 5]

In den 13 Kurzgeschichten geht es um die dunklen Seiten der Liebe in verschiedenen Facetten; um Paare, die sich eigentlich nichts mehr zu sagen haben.
Die Autorin gibt beim Erzählen tiefe Einblicke in die mal skurrilen, mal verstörenden, mal tieftraurigen Gedanken der Protagonist:innen, die eine düstere Melancholie beim Lesen hervorrufen.
In einer Erzählung hatte die Protagonistin zB. gerade ihren Freund verlassen und irrt wie betäubt durch eine fremde Stadt. Sie hofft sich „selbst und jede Spur von Bedeutung hinter [sich] zu lassen“ und landet überraschend in einem Sexshop, in dem sie dann über Kondome aus Schokolade sinniert: „Ich finde, Oralsex sollte nicht in erster Linie ein kulinarisches Erlebnis sein."
Mir sind die Geschichten teilweise zu vulgär und die Inhalte nicht interessant genug, auch wenn die grundlegende Stimmung ganz gut rübergebracht wird.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve had a peripheral awareness of A.L. Kennedy for some time, having frequently read about her in the book papers and occasionally seen her on TV, but before this I’d never actually read one of her books; and it occurred to me, while thumbing through this one in the library, that I honestly had no idea at all of what kind of books she writes. So I thought why not start here? So I did — and I’m glad I did, because this is really rather good.

It’s a collection of stories, most of which are very short. They’re quite sparse in terms of description and there’s not much in the way of immediate drama; those expecting a ripping yarn should look somewhere else. What we have is an assortment of protagonists who exist at some kind of remove from the society around them, either in a classic case of emotional distance or in a just a kind of dazed semi-comic state of bafflement. There’s a guy waiting on a train platform with his wife, mulling over the affairs he’s had with other woman; a young boy sitting on a beach with his dog; a guy having sex with his cleaning lady for no apparent reason; a woman exploring the products on offer in a sex shop as if they were artefacts from a distant planet, dense with hidden meaning.

Writing this now I notice that goodreads is offering me an ‘if you liked this…’ recommendation for Lydia Davis. There’s some interesting similarities between the two, and though Davis’ work is shorter even than Kennedy’s stories here, they both have a certain idiosyncratic manner of writing which is as distinctive as a fingerprint. And indeed everything in this book is written in more or less the same style, which does rather show up the fact that the author has a predilection for the italicised thought bubble and an addiction to the dramatic carriage return — the thrill of the concrete poet at all that white space on the printed page! — but whatever.

It’s a style I enjoy. It’s careful and articulate, detailed in its depiction of an individual’s state of mind at any given moment. It works best when it tends towards the discursive and analytical, and though it’s weaker when it strays towards stark fragmented declarations, its not a weakness I can hold against it. It’s the kind of writing I could read forever, and I do look forward to reading more by this author in the future.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a treat, twelve stories about love by the inimitable AL Kennedy. Love: looking for it, losing it, exploring what love is. Instead of describing the stories, I want to celebrate her writing. The way she tells us so much in just one or two sentences.
‘Late in Life’ features an older couple waiting. They are waiting in a queue at the building society, waiting for him to pay off her mortgage, in a coming-together of two lives. She provocatively eats a fig, being sexy for him “to pass the time.” Despite his hatred of public show, he watches her, “he is now-and-then watching.” He gives her “the quiet rise of what would be a smile if he allowed it. She knows this because she knows him and his habits and the way the colour in his eyes can deepen when he’s glad, can be nearly purple with feeling glad when nothing else about him shows a heat of any kind.”
In ‘The Practice of Mercy’, Dorothy is lost, alone and approaching old age and contemplating her relationship. “She realised once more, kept realising, as if the information wouldn’t stick, realised again how likely it was that someone you’d given the opening of leaving, someone you’d said was free to go, that someone might not discover a way to come back.”
‘All the Rage’ is set on a train platform. A couple are delayed, travelling home from Wales, stuck waiting for a train that never comes. Kennedy tells us everything about their relationship by describing their suitcase. “Inside it, their belongings didn’t mix – his shirts and underpants in a tangle, Pauline’s laundry compressed into subsidiary containments. They had separate sponge bags too. Got to keep those toothbrushes apart.”
Simon, the narrator of ‘Run Catch Run’, considers his unnamed dog, he is at once a child teaching his puppy and also an adult with a mature awareness of inevitability. “His dad had suggested she could be called Pat, which was a joke: Pat the dog. Simon didn’t want to make his dog a joke.”
She shows us so much, in so few sentences.

[jenn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Love the first two stories, then got tired (no matter what time of day I was reading) and just wanted it to be over.

To be fair, had I spread this book out over a period of time, I'm sure I would have had a more positive reaction to these stories, which are so full of beautiful prose. Too many of them followed the model of:

1. I'm not going to tell you what this story is about
2. But you will require clues, so I am going to catalog a bunch of dour details and negative emotions
3. I'm using second person narration, ARE YOU UNCOMFORTABLE YET?
4. BIG REVEAL!!!!

So maybe I should read one of her novels, because she is clearly a major talent, but I am not keen on her use of this form.

[Wolf Ostheeren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't read these stories when you're already down or on your way there. They are beautifully told and moving, but they are sad. A. L. Kennedy has an uncanny ability to make her characters come to life with all their quirks and pain and especially, which seems the main focus of this collection, their inability to talk and listen to each other, to really connect. Which is true and very lifelike, in a way, but (call me an incurable optimist) just one side of the coin.

[Farhana · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the first time I read the author. It was apparent from the first short story that she is a master at crafting words. However, her precise observations interleaved with the characters internal monologue offered too much distraction during the reading, and for that reason, I didn't enjoy the first couple of stories and couldn't develop an appetite for reading the rest of the book.

[Helen McClory]

Stories of poignant silences, half-done gestures, failures small and irreversible.
Reading these stories is like following a line of chains leading into the sea. You aren't sure if you want to be slowly submerged. But you pick them up anyway and let yourself be led.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

Other than title story, eh

[Louisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I needed to stay in Scotland after His Bloody Documents. And I love me some A.L. Kennedy but this was just a bit flat and one-noted for me.

[Luzie · Rating 1 out of 5]

manche kurzgeschichten waren mega gut; nur das andere mega seltsam und kompliziert geschrieben waren
vltl lags auch am english, aber oh gott waren manche verschachtelt
habs dann nur noch überflogen

[Jack Deighton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is Kennedy’s fifth collection of short stories. Most of the contents tend to utilise short sentences. Sometimes verbless. Often with a second person style of narration.
Late in Life recounts the emotions of a younger woman and her older lover the day they have a lawyer’s meeting to determine the details his will. Of a student ahead of them in the queue at the Building Society where they are about to pay off her mortgage she thinks, “Young men are easily confused. They lack resources.”
In Baby Blue a woman wanders into a sex shop to get away from the cold outside and escape thoughts of the medical procedure she has undergone. As she finds herself dogged by the assistant’s efforts to help she ponders her attitude to love. “The real experience of love is of having unreasonably lost all shelter.” Chocolate-flavoured condoms inspire the thought that her experience of oral sex is not “intended to be primarily culinary,” and that “Use of such a device might imply “your penis is inadequate and ought at least to taste of chocolate to compensate, so here you go and roll on one of these.”
Because it’s a Wednesday. Wednesday is the day for the viewpoint character’s domestic help to do the cleaning. Because it’s a Wednesday they are doing what they always do – at her instigation. Because it’s a Wednesday he’s shagging Carmen. (Not a spoiler, it’s the story’s first sentence.)
In the run-up to Christmas a man drops into a church in These Small Pieces. The service prompts thoughts of the unreliability of God and the occurences which have hurt him.
The Practice of Mercy sees a woman take a stroll from her hotel room through an unfamiliar town and return to find her lover, with whom she’d had a disagreement, has come to join her.
The person who has been Knocked is a young boy recovering in hospital from being trampled by a horse, who imagines he can see into the future in a small way.
In All the Rage a married man in his forties who serially tries it on with women finds his match in a twenty-two year-old woman.
In Takes You Home a man who “never intended to grow up and have to be adult” but “did. Naturally,” (although on several occasions had heard it said he’d simply got taller and faked the rest,) ponders the times he had in the flat he’s selling.
The Effects of Good Government on the City features a woman on a visit to Blackpool questioning her relationships.
In Run Catch Run a boy caught up in the throes of his parents’ divorce plays with the dog his father has bought him and his mother says they can’t afford.
The viewpoint character of A Thing Unheard-of is seemingly afraid of contact and runs through the many ways in which they could deliver a message, in person, on the phone, in a letter, electronically.
This Man is the story of a lunchtime first date which is an awkward encounter - until suddenly it’s not.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the author's fifth collection of short stories. Whilst the themes of the stories in All The Rage are varied – death, loss, illness, disappointment and betrayal to name just a few – the links which binds them are love and relationships, in various, often confusing and complex, guises. As with all her short stories I find that I need to read them at least a couple of times (no hardship!) to appreciate fully their meaning and their emotional subtlety and delicacy.
The characters she creates do not always attract immediate respect, understanding, empathy or even sympathy; but, however fallible, they are always portrayed in a humane way. Whether the character is a woman, a man or a child, I find that she manages to find a compelling and convincing voice. Although at times she writes with a very humorous touch, she isn’t reluctant to address painful, uncomfortable subjects. There were moments when I would find myself laughing at her acutely perceptive observations of people and their behaviour and then, just a few sentences on, would feel almost overwhelmed by the pain and pathos of a character’s experiences, or shocked by a description of unexpected violence – at times it felt like being on an emotional roller-coaster.
I am aware that her spare, sharp, rather spiky writing style isn’t to everyone’s taste, but I always enjoy it. I think it lends itself particularly well to the literary distillation required for the sort of short story-telling which appeals to me. I really appreciate the fact that she is able to convey in a single phrase or sentence something another author would take at least a paragraph to describe – an all too rare talent!
I think that the variety of stories would offer reading groups plenty of opportunities for some lively discussion!

[Barbara Sibbald]

A.L. Kennedy never ceases to amaze and confound my inner critic. How on earth can I sum up these astoundingly innovative stories. Each takes a different route in its exploration of the inner self with a range of perspectives from small child embroiled in her parent's separation ("Run Catch Run), to an elderly woman (Late in Life) to a convalescent ("Baby blue"). One expects variety in a collection of short fiction, but this surpasses any expectation.
And the writing. Oh it is fine. I will try to capture a few bon mots, but it isn't easy:

"Because it's a Wednesday": on the expression making love. "Phil has no patience for the expression. He feels it suggests that love can be fabricated like scaffolding or a hull, or that it might be forced inside a collaborator, injected, sweated into life." p 39

"The Practice of Mercy" has a spectacular ending on saying I'm sorry. "And there is a way of saying this which means we can't continue and a way of saying it which means we can keep on and manage and we can be all right." p 72.

"All the Rage" "...with her continual bloody friends who had produced said children without considering that parenthood would mean being broke and staying in the arse-end of Wales, while acting as if it was Italy and wandering hunch-backed streets in a migraine of drizzle." p 90 - migraine of drizzle is amazing.

"This man" "...it's more that you'd rather anticipate fictional disaters than deal with your awareness of how many true things can go wrong." p 202

[Meg Zelinsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

A.L. Kennedy’s All the Rage is a collection of stories that slashes through the polite facades of human relationships to expose the raw, pulsing ache beneath. These stories aren’t kind, nor do they aspire to be. They are unflinching in their depiction of loneliness, yearning, and the quiet humiliations we endure in the name of love.

The collection is a study in precision. Kennedy writes with an exacting eye for detail and imbues even the smallest gestures (the turn of a wrist, the weight of a silence) with an unbearable significance. Her characters often teeter on the edge of despair, suspended by brittle threads of hope. The effect is arresting, but also exhausting. There are moments when her prose feels too much like a blade pressed against the reader’s skin — thrilling at first, then overwhelming, then numbing.

Kennedy’s humor, when it appears, is bitter and dry. It’s not what I expected from her. It suits the stories though, and I liked it. I found myself laughing out loud a few times. But I often wished for more of it. The unrelenting bleakness, while powerful, can at times flatten the emotional terrain, leaving you gasping not for breath but for a small, redemptive laugh. I was begging for more levity and absurdity, and that’s saying something coming from me.

Still, Kennedy’s talent is undeniable. In some stories, she nailed it. I haven’t read anyone I could compare her to. Her style is distinctive: densely layered and unapologetically cerebral. This was a very solid 4/5 for me.

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second book I have read by Scottish author A. L. Kennedy. Kennedy has won the Lannon Literary Award for Fiction and the Costa Book of the Year Award.
All the Rage is a short story anthology. Almost all the stories use the same formal convention. The reader is brought into the narrative in the middle of an issue or situation without explanation or preparation. Because the narrative for almost every story takes place in the protagonist’s mind in an often elliptical stream of consciousness fashion, it takes some time for the reader to piece together exactly what is happening. Sometimes it takes almost the entire story to understand the issue at hand. This convention makes for story codas that are doubly stunning or moving: the emotional payoff of the story takes place just as the nature of the issue comes into focus in the reader’s mind.
This was a fascinating approach, but, after a number of stories it led to a certain sameness. However, this approach was very effective in communicating the protagonist’s paranoia, anxiety, uncertainty, or other emotional state.
Kennedy is a much esteemed author in Great Britain. Her originality and imagination argue for a larger audience in the U.S.

[SadieReadsAgain · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kennedy is one of those writers that I mean to read more of. But I do have a mixed experience with her. I've loved some of her previous work (short stories and Everything You Need), but then wasn't crazy about Serious Sweet. This short story collection kind of falls into that category.

There is a lot that I enjoyed in this collection - her signature wit is here and also her ability to completely break your heart. In particular the story of the boy and his dog, and the man clearing out his flat. These stories cut so precisely at the tangled mess of human emotions. But often I felt lost in the prose, not fully understanding what was happening or what was being hinted at. That may very well be a flaw in me as a reader, or maybe it is the fragmentary, stream-of-consciousness style of some of the stories, but whatever the cause it did stop this collection from fully grabbing me.

Regardless, her status as a writer that I need to read more from hasn't changed. I just need to keep in mind that I never know what I'm going to get.

[Dina · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The real experience of love is of having unreasonably lost all shelter. There are wonderful additional elements in love apart from that, factors and truths w/c demand more than affection, w/c require worship of sorts, but there is, there really is, that initial lost.”

I’m a sucker for sad love stories - romantic or not. Her style of storytelling made me feel like I’m in wherever the characters are and I’m just people watching. I love how the story unfolded with the reader instead of it being handed over. Her prose at times feels like poems cos of the rhythm and repetitions. It also reminded me of Joe Goldberg’s internal dialogue in You.

Have you read this? Which one is your favourite story?

[morninglightmama · Rating 2 out of 5]

Twelve short stories make up this book, but I don't think I could tell you what actually happened in any of them, because while passages were beautiful examples of exquisite word choices, the narratives were confusing AF. Lots of internal dialog and unreliable narrators, it seemed. I'm not sure, but I just couldn't get a firm footing with any of them, really.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alison is a great short story writer. This left me less relentlessly devastated than the other collection of hers I've read: What Becomes. It even has a happy ending. She's clearly going soft.

Would deffo recommend.

[Ali Chakir · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting read. I think I learned more about creative writing from reading this than I did from reading her book 'On Writing'. It's not really as easy read but I found two of the stories quite moving.

[Jennie Miller · Rating 1 out of 5]

Was it well written? Yes. Were any of these stories that needed to have been written? No.

I don't feel that I learned anything, gained any insight from, or even enjoyed much of these. Should anyone else read this book? No, I don't think so.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really enjoyed the last story, "This Man" and the two before it.

[Michelle Croal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Strange style, and also mostly depressing stories.

[Isla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sublime

[Phil · Rating 2 out of 5]

Someone is going to like this, but it isn't me.

[Caroline]

DNF :(