All the Rage


By A.L. Kennedy


Little A/New Harvest

; 215 pages; $24)

The title of Scottish writer A.L. Kennedy's latest story collection, "All the Rage," does not refer to the phrase meaning fashionable or trendy; instead it seems to describe the kind of explosive, violent anger that only love gone wrong can provoke, leaving one broken and bereft. Yet rage isn't the only emotional register here; there are occasional moments of tenderness and affection, and plenty of humor throughout.

In the elliptical opening story, "Late in Life," an unnamed man and woman prepare to move in together and combine their finances. The relationship is tentative but without conflict ("She doesn't ever lie to him unless it's for the best"), which is about as good as it gets in Kennedy's realm. "As a couple, they are purely soft - hard ideas, but tender application. Hardness was before, in all the years before they met, and they have declared an end to it."

One of the funniest stories, "Baby Blue," is a first-person soliloquy on a shopping excursion gone dreadfully wrong. The anonymous female narrator leaves a hotel in a foreign city to wander, and ends up in "a supermarket full of sex. Not sex. Devices engineered - there was a lot of engineering - to mimic the effects of sex."

An over-solicitous shop assistant, Mandy ("For yourself?" "For a special occasion?"), repeatedly ambushes the narrator, provoking alternating feelings of shame and rage - "although this was a setting unsuitable for rage," she says.

In this story, as is true throughout the book, the narrator presents herself to the world while meditating privately on her true needs, yearnings and more. As she walks awkwardly through the sex toy shop, the woman reflects: "The real experience of love is of having unreasonably lost all shelter." And one can only feel unmoored by another person, she thinks, rather than a battery-powered device. Still, she feels forced into making a purchase.

As she stands glumly at the register, she realizes how tired she feels, how weary of life. "I get so angry," she admits. "Uninterrupted fury is a constant. It flickers near and far, but stays with me beneath superficial variations."

In the masterful title story, Mark, a middle-aged journalist, is having an affair with a 22-year-old named Emily. When they aren't together, Mark feels "tight in a fury of needing Emily."

He lives with his wife, Pauline, in a "presentable London postcode," but his home and family life felt "unconvincing when he got stressed." He's unhappy, trapped and contemplates the idea of suicide as an alternative to marriage.

The obsessive affair with Emily proves disastrous, of course, but not before taking a few bizarre and even abusive turns. Looking back, Mark reflects that even "a coma patient could have realized that Emily was dangerous."

"Because It's a Wednesday" covers another affair gone wrong. (The last part of that title phrase is "he's shagging Carmen" - and Carmen is the cleaning lady.) She seems far less enthusiastic about their shagging than the man does, which leaves him feeling dejected and slightly baffled. As her employer, he wonders at one point whether he should pay her more, but decides that "any offers of extra cash would be distasteful."

"The Practice of Mercy" follows another female traveler, Dorothy, who at first appears to be making a trip solo. She stays at a hotel, bored, "trying to kill a day, make it go. Tomorrow she would have to try and kill another." She decides that a cool shower and a nap don't sound so bad. "She could appreciate them. If you operated at that level, it was relatively easy to be content."

Solitude offers ample opportunity for indulging in darker thoughts. Recalling a school chemistry lesson involving the startling interaction of potassium and water, she notes the "tiny blur of lilac flames, too angry to sink. It made Dorothy smile, then and today: the idea that every human body hid a pastel shade of outrage no one should view without safety glasses, or else protective screens." (Such observations would not be out of place in a Lorrie Moore story.)

Of these 12 stories, a few are too vague, evasive or thin to be satisfying (such as "The Effects of Good Government on the City" or "A Thing Unheard-of"). More often than not, however, Kennedy is at her best. She tosses off one achingly precise sentence after another, conveying her characters' frustration, lust, vulnerability and heartbreak.

Sure, we know that desire pushes us to do strange things, but few writers can make our foibles so entertaining, or examine our moments of crisis with such originality and wit.
