PARADISE
By A.L. Kennedy
Knopf. 288 pp. $25
After a life spent hanging around depressives, and having struggled with depression myself, I can say with perfect certainty that depressives believe they're right about the world. They think that optimists are half-wits who don't even begin to live their lives to the fullest, that no news may be good news but that good news is never anything more than cheesy propaganda. The world is garbage, the depressive believes, and holds to that position with a jealous, zealous fury. Jealous, because those half-wits, well-dressed and contented, making their way to church on a Sunday, then walking home through pleasant parks to a well-deserved, well-balanced meal, must be morons, they must, they must! (What if happiness really is possible in this world? That would be intolerable.) Zealots, for the same reason. The case that the world is garbage must be proved again and again with Paulian tenacity. Because there is just enough kindness and mariachi music and office romance around to suggest that life, in fact, might be enormous fun -- a possibility that causes depressives to gnaw at their wrists in futile rage. Theirs, and only theirs, is the authentic life. It must be. It has to be.
Here, in A.L. Kennedy's new novel, "Paradise," we find another beautifully argued case for the misery of life and the authenticity of suffering. A.L. Kennedy has spoken in interviews about the saintliness of those who -- in a religious sense -- don't just bear the cross but are the cross. They embrace the whole of sorrow. The sufferer here is Hannah Luckraft, a single Scotswoman approaching 40, who lives in the same dreary city where she grew up and where her beloved brother Simon and parents still reside. "Paradise" seems to be based on the Stations of the Cross, the ritualized way that Catholics remember (by means of singing, prayer and procession) Christ's last agony -- his scourging, his crowning with thorns, his three falls on the way to Calvary. Hannah's "cross" is divided three ways: her uncontrollable love of liquor, her hideous taste in men and her burning shame at the suffering that her antics put her family through.
Hannah aims -- as do so many who love alcohol -- for that first lovely swallow of Scotch and for the relatively few minutes or hours that follow the swallow, the warmth of the body, the camaraderie with other drinkers, the noise of the party or pub, the illusion (no matter how shaky) that the world is inviting and hospitable. But Hannah's a terrible drunk; she invariably rushes past those precious moments to the part where she's throwing up in the nearest alley, waking up in a stranger's bed, embarrassed, deathly ill, bathed in humiliation.
She's found the perfect man for herself -- Robert Gardener, a scummy, second-rate dentist who inflicts untold agony on his unsuspecting patients because of his continually shaking, hung-over hands, a man who's left his wife and child but who still tries to weasel money out of them or anyone else who will stand for it. He'd be a con artist if he were smart enough, but on his best day he's no more than a grotesque ninny. Hannah "loves" him, however; she's all over him like a cheap suit.
The unfortunate pair grimly lurch their way through an unbearably degrading life in a narrative that's almost impossible to read. When the author overplays her hand by -- for instance -- allowing Hannah's bashed-in face to be recorded on a hospital sheet, recalling the moment when Veronica applied her cloth to Jesus's face, or by creating a scene when Hannah steps on a nail that punctures her sole/soul, the reader can only be grateful for the variety of Kennedy's Verfremdungseffekt, those blessed Brechtian moments of alienation that allow the reader to draw back and remember that this is, after all, only a book.
But maybe not. Maybe the world is suffering, and only that. To sew up her case, Kennedy pitilessly shows us the helpless agony of Hannah's family. After all, who really cares about a couple of tiresome drunks? But her mother, father and brother suffer, suffer, suffer, like innocent puppies being kicked again and again. It's ghastly.
Some readers will shy away from this book. But some will recognize Hannah as a sister or a cousin and take grim satisfaction in her pitiless worldview. Whatever else novels like this may accomplish, they reassure the desperately unhappy that they're not alone.
