Christine Schutt is the author of two short story collections, Nightwork and A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer, and two novels, Florida, a National Book Award finalist, and the recently published, All Souls. She lives and teaches in New York.
Since first discovering A.L. Kennedy’s novel, Paradise, in 2005, I have read the book or portions of the book every summer. The narrator, Hannah Luckraft, an alcoholic, is a great disappointment to her family but a boon drinking buddy to Robert. Both are impressively self-destructive, and their romance with drinking and the oblivion it promises is conveyed in the most inventive language. Open the book to any page and there is relief for the language depleted. Here is Kennedy making all kinds of noise: “Beyond the lintel’s shade, there is the sweeetness of grain fields on the breeze, the bland dust of poor soil, baked to a yellowish crust . . . bladderwrack and rock clefts dank with scrub and gorse; that slightly human musty fug of heated gorse, the snap of its seeds, the blood drop in the yellow of each flower: which is to say, the smell and taste and everything of my being a child in summer. . .” The sly and self-aware Hannah, caught still in bed, says “there is always something horizontal in your tone that gives you away and you may occasionally wonder whether this is, in fact, what you want.” More unsettled at times, Hannah slurs into italicized panic: “JesusI’mscaredandIhaven’tacluewhatmy faceisupto.” Some surfaces are “sheened with misfortune,” and fumes and toxins “are briling about.” Oh, I could go on. Robert “dunts in against (her) shoulder” or “coories himself in behind (her).” Page after page of surprises. I don’t think I will ever tire of Paradise.
