Paradise

Ms Kennedy must have expected Americans to dislike the book in exactly the ways expressed here; mainly because of the protagonist's attitude towards her own life: She knows it's awful, but she is unwilling to change it. (That's not an un-American attitude, mind you: millions of American alcoholics will agree.) Somehow she seems to feel that being an alcoholic is what she is; especially the destructive bits. The mastery of Kennedy's book is in the way in which she makes the reader almost understand that attitude. This makes it a book for people who want to find out something new about the world. A book, as Kafka said, that is an axe for the frozen sea inside us.

It's apparent, reading other reviews of Kennedy's book, Paradise, that for many people good literature is that which reinforces their own ideas about the world, the happy ending which leaves them pleasantly sated being essential. (Why, exactly, we would be interested in the opinions of people who didn't read or only got part way through the book is beyond me.) That is adamantly, not what this book is about. It is an unflinching look over the edge, a story which harbors no illusions about a happy ending. It is also, literature of the highest sort, a searing look at how everyday life can blend into madness. It is the first person account of one Hannah Luckraft, a thirtyish year old woman whose alcoholism is either medication for an intractable depression or the cause of it. While sections of the book have been described as humorous, it is humor of the wry sort, the I-know-what-she-means sort (i.e. having been there myself,) it is nothing close to comic. It is the story of an addiction in all its technocolor black and white, its unanswerable needs and inevitable debasement. Kennedy's knowledge seems to be of the insider's sort implying either an extrordinary ability to write about her own experience or an enviable capacity for imagination. Whichever it reflects, this book is superb.

It's apparent, reading other reviews of Kennedy's book, Paradise, that for many people good literature is that which reinforces their own ideas about the world, the happy ending which leaves them pleasantly sated being essential. (Why, exactly, we would be interested in the opinions of people who didn't read or only got part way through the book is beyond me.) That is adamantly, not what this book is about. It is an unflinching look over the edge, a story which harbors no illusions about a happy ending. It is also, literature of the highest sort, a searing look at how everyday life can blend into madness. It is the first person account of one Hannah Luckraft, a thirty-ish year old woman whose alcoholism is either medication for an intractable depression or the cause of it. While sections of the book have been described as humorous, it is humor of the wry sort, the I-know-what-she-means sort (i.e. having been there myself,) it is nothing close to comic. It is the story of an addiction in all its technicolor black and white, its unanswerable needs and inevitable debasement. Kennedy's knowledge seems to be of the insider's sort implying either an extraordinary ability to write about her own experience or an enviable capacity for imagination. Whichever it reflects, this book is superb.

This is a remarkable novel. Kennedy is a superb stylist--each sentence gives me a pang that I didn't write it myself--and the narrator is funny and endearing and maddening even as the story she's telling gets bleaker and bleaker. I really, really liked this book. (I liked Augusten Burroughs' "Dry" too; that's a great story, well-told, though he's not on this level as a stylist; but this, though it's fiction rather than memoir, is ultimately a more realistic and painful picture of life as an alcoholic. Not to knock Burroughs. Read that too! But this novel's amazing in a completely different way.)