What Becomes

Robin Romm

In the harrowing stories that make up A. L. Kennedy's fourth collection, What Becomes, people buckle under the weight of misfortune: dead children, dismembered limbs, failing marriages, spurned hearts. It might be surprising, then, that it's such a relief to read them…[Kennedy] continues to impress with her psychological fearlessness and breathtaking affection for language.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

A bold new collection by relentlessly surprising Scottish author Kennedy (Day) finds her characters pinned somewhere between love and pain. In the title story, about a lone man's evening attending a smalltown cinema, the denouement comes very gradually, as it does frequently throughout, reflecting a kind of reluctant dawning of consciousness: the protagonist, a forensics expert traumatized by having seen so much carnage, has left his wife after the death of their young daughter, an event that has rendered them unable to stand the guilt and anger evoked by the other's presence. “Wasps” captures a young wife and mother as she is making a Sunday breakfast. This seemingly typical scene is frozen by the menace of the philandering husband's leaving for good and his icy treatment of his angry wife. “Saturday Teatime” depicts the panicked delayed memory shock experienced by a child listening to her father's abuse of her mother, while “Marriage” portrays the excruciating emotional and physical aftermath of a violent sexual encounter between a husband and wife. These stories are polished to perfection, full of very dark turns and exemplary of Kennedy's inventiveness. (Apr.)

Library Journal

Kennedy, winner of the 2007 Costa Award, here offers a dozen remarkable tales. In the title story, a man finds himself ignored at a movie theater, just as he is at home. In "Edinburgh," a man remembers his last, failed love affair and bitterly longs to leave his organic shop to be with the woman in question. "Confectioner's Gold" features Tom and his wife, Elaine, who splurge on a meal at a Japanese restaurant, though they have lost their American jobs and house and have returned to England to live with her mother. In "Marriage," what looks like a regular marital spat has darker underpinnings. Most of the stories in this collection are unrelievedly somber, but in "Another," the actor who takes on Barry Wescott's starring role in a popular children's show also captures the hearts of Barry's widow and daughter. Kennedy explores her characters by shifting through first-, second-, and third-person narrative, exposing their fallacies. VERDICT Although comic in spots, this brilliant collection is finally very dark, painting a pretty bleak picture of human existence. Recommended for fans of stories by Margaret Atwood or Doris Lessing. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/09.]—Amy Ford, St. Mary's Cty. Lib., Lexington Park, MD

Kirkus Reviews

Connecting with other people is the only thing harder than being alone in this piercing collection from gifted Scottish novelist Kennedy (Day, 2007, etc.). The complex, often agonizing negotiations of marriage are the subject of several fine stories. "What Becomes," an internal monologue by a man sitting in a movie theater, unreels memories of his bizarre behavior after he cuts himself in the kitchen and his wife's despairing response; they've lost a daughter, we gradually realize, and are painfully estranged in their separate mourning. The infestation in "Wasps" illustrates a traveling businessman's insouciance in the face of his wife's sorrow over his infidelities and his sons' grief over his absences. Male violence roils "Marriage," a creepy monologue by an abusive husband, and "Saturday Teatime," narrated by a woman unable to suppress childhood memories of laughing hysterically at an afternoon TV show so that her friend wouldn't hear the sounds of her father beating her mother. Yet troubled spouses can sustain each other as well, like the couple in "Confectioner's Gold" dealing with bankruptcy in the aftermath of the economic meltdown. The longing for companionship suffuses many tales, notably the risky but triumphant "Sympathy," which portrays a one-night stand with graphic sexual frankness that illuminates the protagonists' loneliness and sadness. The widow of a popular but nasty children's entertainer finally gets a good man in "Another," though it's more than a little weird that he's a performer hired to replicate her dead husband's signature character, Uncle Shaun. Happiness is neither easily achieved nor unmixed in Kennedy's stories, but she's compassionate toward even her mostdamaged creations, aware that we find pleasure where we can. The rowdy amputees at a public pool in "As God Made Us" and the oddballs waiting around a stage door for the magician they idolize in "Vanish" find it in camaraderie with fellow misfits: "They're all going nowhere. Together."Sensitively observed, elegantly written snapshots of the human condition, unsparing yet tender.

The Barnes & Noble Review

A particularly bleak episode in A. L. Kennedy's 1997 volume, Original Bliss, imagines an astronaut drifting from his shuttle, tempted to perish in outer space. What Becomes -- the mordant, meditative latest collection by the Scottish writer and stand-up comic -- takes place on an often otherworldly Earth. One character spends her entire story in a therapeutic flotation device; another lingers in a deserted cinema, watching a movie play soundlessly. Studies of alien landscapes both physical and psychological, these tales imprison people in their own minds: like Kennedy's astronaut, her latest characters are almost fatally disconnected.

When they do attempt to relate to one another, they tend to come off as robots harboring half-hearted social aspirations. "It was sometimes good to make a conversation, join in," a man observes in "Vanish." And sometimes not. One of Kennedy's most stirring stories, "Marriage," describes the horrors of joining: its protagonist abuses his wife. Rather than open themselves to others, Kennedy characters -- like the tormented souls of Dostoevsky -- frequently teem with unspoken soliloquies. Enclosed in the husband's head, we experience "Marriage" as a terrifying trap -- just as his wife, perhaps, experiences wedlock.

He recalls an incident that prompted him to hit her: "She was there in his home, in his room, in his bed in his dark and supposed to be his love -- the feel of her smile, he was trying for that, his mouth idiotic with trying to find out that, with expecting her to be alive for him -- but she turned away." That repeated "his" suggests he wants not merely to connect with her, but also to own her, to absorb her into himself. And yet his feelings -- his desire for her to come alive, his lurch as she distances herself -- also seem rather natural. The sharpest moments of What Becomes permit the normal to bleed into the pathological, the casual into the criminal. The husband goes on:

Hit her.
Just the once.
The noise of it.
Fantastic.
Like a shot.
Came after that.
Back in her and came.
Like a shot.
Which is why she had to be so awkward about today.

He shares his memory in short lines that strike quick and hard, and so revels in reliving that he echoes his own phrases. "Like a shot," he says twice -- highlighting the conflation of love and violence, touching and hurting, that haunts many of the stories in What Becomes. A frighteningly nonchalant analysis grounds this column of prose, a summary appropriate to everyday injury. And her injury is everyday -- he beats her regularly -- which is why it's also remarkable. His wife spends most of the story several feet away from him: "Marriage" literalizes, and justifies, our distances from each other.

For all their incapacity to connect, many of Kennedy's characters seem like-minded, painted from the same palette of tones -- neurotic, sardonic, introspective. (One imagines they might enjoy group therapy together.) And for all the book's interest in strangeness, it sometimes recreates typical -- even stereotypical -- situations. As a whole, the collection presents a spectrum of neurosis most compelling at its extremes: the playfulness of "Story of My Life," for example, provides welcome counterweight to the despair of "Marriage."

The abused wife's bruised cheek is only a single injury among many in What Becomes. Another character draws blood during overeager sexual experimentation, and several slice their thumbs. One of the latter -- tormented by events Kennedy never specifies -- observes the blood dripping from his hand, and sees "patterns complicating patterns… telling the story of someone standing, wounded." The complications of our patterns, the variety and plenitude of our wounds -- these are the subjects of Kennedy's own stories, whether they unfold in outer space or in our devastated inner cosmos.

--Abigail Deutsch