Claire Lowdon
Too Much of a Good Thing
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph in 2011, A L Kennedy objected to ‘Hollywood endings’ and ‘people wanting the unobtainable’. She’s certainly not a writer we associate with happily-ever-after: her 2009 short story collection, What Becomes, asked what exactly does become of the brokenhearted, while in 2011’s All the Rage (more short stories), one character defines ‘the real experience of love’ as ‘having unreasonably lost all shelter’. Connections missed, damaged people doing damage to one another, loss, loneliness, the despair and rage that lurk beneath the everyday: these are the key ingredients of Kennedy’s inimitable fiction, leavened by some of the driest, blackest humour on the market.
It’s clever of her, then, to write a whole novel about a happy ending. Serious Sweet takes place over twenty-four hours in the lives of Londoners Jon and Meg. We are introduced to them, separately, at 6.42am (each chapter is given a precise time). But gradually it becomes clear that
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'We nipped down Mount Pleasant ... me marvelling at London all over again because the back of a Vespa gives you the everyday world like nothing else can.'
Ali Smith writes this month's diary.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/temple-of-vespa
We were saddened to hear of the recent passing of the novelist Elspeth Barker, a valued contributor to Literary Review over the years. (1/2)
Jean Rhys 'had been channelling unhappiness since the publication of her first volume of short stories in 1927. The four novels she published before the war chart journeys that go from bad to worse for heroines who end up alone in dreary hotel rooms.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-went-down-well-with-vicars