"We are attempting to survive our time" by A.L. Kennedy (Vintage, 2021)

• Panic Attack - Ronnie, 5'6" on tip-toe is at a train station after visiting his mother. He sees a bearded man - "It's not a hipster bastard beard he's got, and not the full Gandalf I-have-mice-in-here nonsense, either. Average beard. Not a white bloke trying to show off being Muslim." The woman beside her seems in trouble. He helps - not too much or little. She's had a panic attack. She and he get on the train in different carriages. We learn that he's been protective to his mother when young. He killed his nasty father, whose body wasn't found for weeks. He wants the women to find him and ask for help. No.
• Everybody's pleased to see you - At the Salazar bar/cafe/restaurant, it's like Cheers - if you're the right sort of person, it'll be like home. Chic too - "the Salazar's latest mirrors, said to have once reflected the Ceausescus". The clients are interesting - "You might take them for sisters ... They don't share a mother, they share a surgeon". Near the end we're told "We can all have the Salazar and have it forever, any one of us, anyone who is a Salazar kind of person". No.
• Walker - A bride of 2 days, walks after midnight barefoot from her hotel to the beach. She recalls the wedding ceremony, how her mother-in-law apologised for mistakes. The bride thinks she might have made a mistake, that she's not worthy of love. No.
• Waiting in the Jesus queue - The narrator thinks "No one ever gets to be spontaneous without rehearsing". He's rehearing a TV interview. He's a celeb, famous from a TV kids show that's long finished. He's in films now, and is thinking of writing a book. Chloe's left him. Invited to a kid's deathbed he fled. He's trying to recover. The worst so far
• Unanswered - Adopted, knowing he lived on a UK bombsite, the narrator as a boy sometimes left the house in night, being found by policemen etc. He married Julie. He learnt he was born in Germany. He ;lkstracked down the soldier involved with his transfer and discovers how he was saved in Berlin. They went to live in a house also on a bombsite. It saved his marriage. Julie died, childless.
• Inappropriate staring - The narrator (who repeatedly says she wants to see choughs and is thirsty) is separated from her alcoholic husband. She has a son, Peter. She's back in Jersey where each year holidayed with "uncle" Mort. She's sorting out his house. She finds letters and presents that were sent to her and returned to sender by her parents. She's visiting the Zoo. She watches a son and mother bicker about the son's wife. They comment on the gorillas' behaviour. Her parents argued. She and Peter don't. The son and mother stare at her as they talk about gorillas' maternal habits etc. Mort in his will said that he loved the narrator, who wonders if he was her mother's old lover. Was she his daughter? When the big male appears, the mother suddenly grabs the narrator's hand, saying "He looked at me". The narrator (reported speech) launches into a rant about injustice, racism, rape, etc. The crowd turn to watch. The mother weeps, the son suppresses his anger. (I like it)
• Am Sonntag - Berlin? She wakes late. She'd arrived the night before in borrowed clothes, in a truck. From her window she sees people relaxing by a lake. She recalls Laszlo being attacked and killed. She remembers summer days, hears a piano being tuned. She wanders in the big house as if in a dream, following the piano noise. Reaching the tuner, she realises that her husband, daughter and mother have gone, but she's alive. The ending is "It will be terrible, this surviving"
• It might be easier to fail - "I know he's not in change any more, but guilty's guilty" thinks the 1st person PoV who uses words like "implacable" and "demeanour". He keeps under observation the guarded house where his target ("darling of the people ... peacemaker between nations") lives. The narrator's daughter died in a hit-and-run van incident. The target's decisions were responsible for killing children. No.
• Point for lost children - Anne (Scottish, homeless, a battered wife who couldn't have children) is sitting on the floor at Leicester Square Tube station when Marilyn (a do-gooder?) sits beside her, trying to help. Anne remembers her therapy, her childhood. She counts if she feels stressed, counting seconds if there's nothing else to count. Marilyn tells her about her dead daughter and starts crying. The police move them on. They pass the place where lost children are dealt with. (It became rather formulaic/predictable as the backstories trickled in, but maybe that was a point. It's all first person, using reported speech, which breaks the standard guidelines.)
• Even words have meaning - It's 1944. Post-war exhaustion. An oxbridge war correspondent (1st person PoV) has crossed Europe to a desert. People are killing themselves (guilt, despair). He's lost confidence in the quality of his reports back home. We learn about a doctor who did mercy killings. His colleague Stillwell disappeared/died in strange circumstances. Perhaps he returns sometimes to kill them one by one. (I can see how this could have worked - a mind losing touch with reality having witnessed too many atrocities)
• New Mexico - The "I" (Phoebe) is recording her 100th episode of Post-Traumatic Podcast. No guests this time. She starts with an ad for a travel bag with lots of personal safety features. She left New Mexico at 13 after her mother left without warning and her father killed himself in the car she'd abandoned. Phoebe went to live with her mother's parents in Colorado. She started cutting, etc. 6 years ago, new DNA tests revealed that her mother had been the victim of a serial. The police called her in to show her photos that that the killer had taken - some only moments before her death, when she knew she'd die, her eyes looking into the future at Phoebe. (OK)
• Spider - Anne and Raph (an academic couple) are trying to hide from their kids Tom (7) and Deborah the fact that things are left on their doorstep - stones, poo, and (in the past) notes. They've moved to aa village from a city. Anne doesn't know the best way to deal with the spider in the bathroom. The children find one in the garden and aren't scared of it. They wonder about takingit to the bathroom. Some of the notes contain racist abuse - Raph's a German Jew. And she's black? Though it's daytime she goes round the house with the kids turning on lights "so that everyone can see us being happy when the dark comes"
• We are attempting to survive our time - A couple argue in front of people near the top of Cologne cathedral. The narrator thinks "I am holding back and being flexible because women are flexible and compromise ... I know he's always chosen women who will hurt him". He says she's just like his mother. She thinks he shouts just like her father. They descend to the city, hold hands again. "We are attempting to survive our time" is a quote from the Voyager craft. She thinks that "We live in a time when a bag with no owner can only hold terrible things."

There's no pressure to be brief. The extra words don't reveal more about the character - they're generic verbosity. There's often a revelation towards the story's end, some significant backstory detail (often involving a death) that's been withheld. Sometimes at the start we're explicitly promised a revelation.

Other reviews

• Alex Preston (Almost all of the characters in these stories are, as one of them describes himself, “unreliable in the head”, prone to visions and elaborate self-delusions, all in the attempt to get through the day)
• Chris Power (for much of We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time she constructs her stories in the most non-dramatic ways possible: this book is an orgy of telling, and it makes for exhausting reading. ... Numerous stories that sound engaging in outline are scuttled by their execution ... The best story here, by some distance, is the one in which showing far outweighs telling ... “Spider”)
• Lee Randall (Throughout this collection she traces psychological cracks to their sources, engaging our empathy ... Standout stories for this reader include ‘Everybody’s Pleased to See You‘ ... She excels at balancing disdain with empathy, and even her racist has his humanity.)
• Rosemary Goring (All but one of the stories here is in the first person. ... In places Kennedy’s writing is slack and repetitive, sounding more like the spoken word than the concision and allusiveness necessary for a memorable short story. The sudden reveals in several tales feel overly dramatic and manipulatively tragic, as if everything that matters most must spring from profound sorrow or loss. The bookends of the collection show Kennedy at her best. ... Panic Attack ... We Are Attempting To Survive Our Time)

"What Becomes" by A.L. Kennedy (Jonathan Cape, 2009)

In a recent interview she said "What Becomes" is more tonally together than any of my other books, partly because [the stories] have a definite commitment to misery, rather than an inadvertently high amount of misery. I can believe that. Couples fall apart. So do individuals.

In "What Becomes" an apparent mental breakdown is represented by a film without the sound-track, and a CD-player whose replay button replays just the previous track. In the following paragraph I was confused by "Converse All Stars" (a brand-name?) and distracted by "but you never could tell" (how much are we supposed to read into it?)

Then behind him there came a grumble of male conversation, a blurry complaint about the cold and then a burst of laughter and the noise of feet - heavy steps approaching and a softer type of scuffling that faded to silence. Frank was willing to be certain that Softer-foot was the kid from the door: lax posture and dirty Converse All Stars with uneven wear - product of a careless home, an unsupportive environment - probably he'd padded in behind Frank again for some reason and then headed out to the foyer - that's how it sounded, but you never could tell", p.4

When he cuts a finger it's "Funny how he didn't feel the pain until he saw the wound", p.7

In "Wasps" "love and pain are names for the same thing. Give one, mean the other. Get one, want the other. Mean one, get the other back for it. Want one, want the other, want both", p.30. A thumb bleeds.

In "Edinburgh" a promising affair goes wrong when they sleep together. There's another hand injury - "His thumb only started hurting when he noticed it, once he understood what had gone wrong", p.49

"Saturday Teatime" features a visit to a Flotation Tank. Thoughts drift. There are passages in italics and extensive use of line-breaks

Word dreams. No internal organs, just a mass of unlikely excuses for their absence. And no way to stop the words. No, there is, though. There is. I am in charge here. That's right. And nodding my agreement rocks the heart of everything. Which is myself. For an hour. (p.59)

In "Confectioner's Gold" the connection between emotion and expression can disappear or become too strong, too mechanical. There are more italics and line-breaks - a different person to the one in "Saturday Teatime" yet the same voice

Or do I say nothing because they're blind? Am I prejudiced in that way, too? Am I a bastard? I think I am. Quite possibly? A total bastard. And my wife would agree. Is that a positive - because we agree? Tom needs a coffee, but suspects he can't drink any more. (p.79)

"Marriage" sounds like a promising title in an otherwise unremittingly gloomy book. However, it begins "This isn't working, he can tell". The man's coat fits better than he and his wife do.

In "Story of my life" various visits to the dentist are strung together. But in addition to that there's a meta-plot.

• The story begins "In this story, I'm like you. / Roughly and on average, I am the same: the same as you./The same is good. ... I understand a lot - very often - almost all the time - most especially the stories. They are an exercise of will: within them whatever I think, I can wish it to be" (p.139)
• "And I should pause here briefly, because it lets the story breathe and even possibly give a wink. I step back to let you step forward and see what's next. This way you'll stay with us. With me./ Which is the point", p.142
• "And this section of the story is here for you to like and to let your liking spread to me", p.144

"Whole Family with Young Children Devastated" has lost dogs, people emoting in public, and a couple having an affair who enjoy being on the phone together while watching a psychic show on TV. "Sympathy" (another promising title) has hotel sex between strangers. In "Another" a dead husband is replaced by an improved version. In "Vanish" a man buys 2 tickets for a show, but his girlfriend leaves him before the date, so on the night he tries to give the ticket away. A strange guy who claims he knows the performer takes it.

Other reviews

• Alex Clark (Guardian) ("It is a critical commonplace to describe Kennedy's work as unremittingly bleak ... Disappointment and disaster stalk the pages")
• Patrick Gale (Independent) ("AL Kennedy is one of nature's Eeyores. Her fictional territory, staked out in a sequence of technically ever more impressive novels, is grim. To criticise her work for bleakness would be missing the point ... "Marriage" is a micro-masterpiece")
• Tania Hershman (The Short Review) ("As God Made Us is an extremely powerful story")
• Matt Thorne (The Telegraph) ("is as dour and difficult as anything she’s produced to date. ... The best story in the collection, 'Sympathy’ … Only one story seems slightly silly, 'Marriage’")
• dovegreyreader ("the grim, harsh realities of life stalk these pages in many guises")
• KevinfromCanada
• Kevin (booklit)
• Robin Romm (New York Times) ("Like many of Kennedy’s characters, the woman in the flotation tank doesn’t go anywhere or do anything. Perception moves the story forward.")
• Claire Sawers (The Scotsman) (""FRAILTY and failure, they're charismatic," announces AL Kennedy midway through her latest collection of short stories, where she stops narrating and turns the spotlight back on herself for a moment.")
• Holloway McCandless (Identity Theory) ("usually when a character is on the cusp of connection or the acceptance of disconnection, Kennedy’s pulsating prose appendage surges up to produce a new organism: intelligent word-flesh.")

"Indelible Acts" by A.L. Kennedy (Jonathan Cape, 2002)

Lots of sex where emotion involves a third person. There are middle-age breakdowns of various types. The main characters are often men, though it's not always clear. One gets the impression sometimes that the only way to change is to suffer brain injury - here's the first and final sentence of each story

• Things could go wrong with one letter, he knew that now ... That's how I should be
• It's unmistakable, organic, the flavour of something live ... But, finally, it seems she has developed a complete immunity
• Yes ... Hot little word
• I wouldn't want to say so, but it's freezing in here ... And it really should be very amusing that this will go on, that I have nothing better, that no matter what, I still want to be sure that we won't leave each other alone.
• Ronald was holding on ... Ronald would wait to get older and stronger and then it would hasten, he'd make it: he'd be bad son
• He was driving to pick up the boxes when he realised what was making him most afraid: the arithmetic ... There would be a moment today and he would reach it and he would catch it and understand that he would be ready to see her then, he would be ready perfectly
• It wasn't difficult ... We must both look at him, walking in sunlight and find him beautiful
• This is where you end up, then, your last resort ... She didn't know if she was crying, whether anyone could see, and the clouds dragged over the evening hills in silence and there was nothing left for her to burn
• Danny wondered where he was: where he was ... He didn't know what should happen after that
• I would prefer not to open my eyes, not this morning ... Nothing has changed
• You should tell everyone nothing: especially nothing about love … It is beautiful and terrible and blinding and you will never understand the trick of it
• The thunder had battered and turned above the house for most of the night and they had stayed in their separate bed-rooms, Sarah watching the woods cracked open, stripped out of the dark … That's all right

In "Spared", morbid emptiness comes over a man during what seems a perfect affair. "Awaiting an adverse reaction" is much shorter (4 pages). The good ending doesn't quite save it. Often (sometimes too fatalistically) the situation mirrors the psychology. In "How to find your way in woods", for example, a couple investigate the chances of reconciliation by walking in the woods after a storm. In "Not anything to do with love", someone who barely knew the deceased attends a cremation service and notices, about halfway through the story, an ex amongst the congregation. The balance of the two parts didn't seem right to me. As in "A bad son", the new plot ingredient introduced halfway through the story seemed like a literary ploy.

She uses metaphor where many would use simile - "Dave widened his eyes for an instinct and then took her glance, drew it, and lit a live pause in her before he blinked away", p.196. When describing a heightened experience, metaphors come thick and fast

• Howie still cradled himself, now facing the doorway and knowing a thick lift of want was taking his weight from his finger. He was yowling with solidity, pressing his thought up and forward into one or two beads of clarified despair. Before lack and embarrassment and, almost undoubtedly, fear slammed at him and started to wither his hopes, p.38
• Ronald shut his eyes and let himself slip and be part of a big, long shine and he smiled and smiled and stretched back so that he was lying down, resting on it, the way that another boy might, one who did this all the time. He'd been scared before he started, but you could only be scared for a while and then it changed - became something else - this time it had burst to nothing, to a hot, white light that was marvellous and still and he was so happy with it that he let the day take his breath, p.65-66
• The best love is a little like light. It is unremitting, cannot fail to find you, to take the shortest, surest way, as if that were marked out as part of your nature, the line where you and love are made to meet. It is your law, the physics of your life. It will move from somewhere to nowhere and back again and it will make you lost. It is beautiful and terrible and blinding and you will never understand the trick of it (the end of "A little like light")

She uses italicized sections to indicate juxtaposition or an alternative viewpoint/voice (almost in a Gollum/Smeagol way at times). Here's an example

A Bob Lomax flirts with Patty because he feels sorry for her, although neither of them will take it any further and that won't be the only bottle that Patty empties this afternoon The James Bridge air was doubly unsettled, wicked with sand and the twist of invisible insults inflicted and received, the raw balance of hypocrisies, the jar and slide of halted, permitted, invited, avoided and frustrated sex. A fraction of the grit in your teeth would always be bitter with sex And I do want to be wrong about this. I would love God to be here with with His every intervention plain ("Elsewhere", p.131-2).

"Day" by A.L. Kennedy (Vintage, 2008)

An extra in a PoW film flashes back to his bookshop job, war action, love and home. Early on we're teasingly told about Joyce and his murdered father. It's not until p.196 that sex and death details fully emerge. The style's full of interjections and alternations. Here's a fragment from p.2, showing how the style approaches stream-of-consciousness

'Hello, looks like London Fog again.'
Pluckrose had started them calling it London Fog: the Thames smoke haze in the briefing room - him first and then everybody. One of the things they had between them as a crew: 'London Fog again.'
But he wouldn't remember Pluckrose, wasn't going to ask him in.
Chop it. All right?
And this time I mean it. All right?
So the noise throttled back, obedient, let him be where he was.
Not that he was any too clear about that - his precise location - beyond the fact that he was sitting, sitting behind a young moustache.

On p.11 it flicks into 2nd-person. Then again on p.27. By p.45 we're back in the 3rd person, a more distanced one

The back door was open and the smell of their last roses coming in and a wedge of sunshine fallen down into the hall with the cat lying in it and purring, you could tell by the set of his head before you even heard a sound.

(the 'you' in this extract is confusing though). This changing of PoVs lets the intimacy of the narrator to the subject vary. Sometimes the words are the author's even if the thoughts are the character's

Cover's too thick, visibility zero. Good to keep inside it, cosy - but you'll never see the target. Hit'em with dead reckoning and guesswork - what a way to fight a war.
But it's not so bad.
The kick when the bombs are gone, the airframe jumping up in the love of it, the last spring in her lifting under you, flexing - bombs tumbling, diving to nothing, swallowed, a pale bloom spreading here and there, flushing the haze, but inconclusive.
'That's another field of Nazi cows gone west, then.' Pluckrose - always sounds younger on the intercom and very far away. (p.156)

It's nothing like her short-stories that I've read. I'm impressed.

"Looking for the Possible Dance" by A.L. Kennedy (Minerva, 1994)

I preferred this to Angela Carter's "Love". Kennedy's default characters have a self-awareness and detachment that lends itself to irony and gentle comedy. They tend to be indecisive, attracted to quirky characters who might help them change.

I'm not keen on the dream sequences, but there's much else to like: "She was a single person when people were always expected in pairs, like eyebrows or like gloves"; "And that was all it took to make you miss things, a mild impossibility, a slight difference of birds."

Scenes jump forwards and backwards in time between storylines, at a smaller scale than the chapter. There's some adumbration within and between the storylines: "Another year will pass before Colin has his pain, a pain which will surprise them both".

"Now that you're back" by A.L. Kennedy (Vintage, 1994)

Over 200 pages of short stories, and this is only one of several books that she's written! 'A Perfect Possession', 'Armageddon Blue...', Warming my Hands and Telling Lies' did little for me, but at least they were unsatisfying in different ways. There was quite a lot to like elsewhere, and I was happy to see the story form stretched in 'The Mouseboks Family Dictionary'. There's humour (in e.g. 'On Having more Sense') and enough variety in the stories. The 1st person voices sound a little too samey though.

"original bliss" by A.L. Kennedy (Vintage, 1998)

I much preferred this to her earlier book - narrators are more varied in location, age and outlook. They stay in character better too. I liked 'Rockaway and the Draw', 'Groucho's Moustache' and 'The Snowbird' in particular, and the ending of 'Breaking Sugar' was striking.

"Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains" by A.L. Kennedy (Phoenix, 1993)

Wife battering and sensitivity to smells appear rather a lot, and I think that too often a structural gimmick is used to make a plain biography more interesting. "Genteel Potatoes" isn't much of a story, nor is "Star Dust". "The role of notable silences in Scottish history" is better in this respect, the form matching the content. Kennedy tries to show us characters' thoughts using their own forms of languages, but too often the characters (perhaps because of shared pre-occupations or states of mind) sound much like each other.

"Translations" is very different from the rest of the pieces. I'd have liked to see more experiments like this. I liked "The seaside photographer" best, perhaps because the author didn't use adultery or murder to force a piece of "writing" into the shape of a "story".

"[in A.L.Kennedy's stories] there is nearly always a running imagery ... which at first seems inconsequential, but which can in the end be seen as a kind of correlative, a summing-up in metaphor of the central issue", Douglas Gifford , "A History of Scottish women's writing", Edinburgh UP, 1997, p.617