After experiencing A.L.Kennedy in a reading/stand up appearance, without ever previously hearing of any of her work, I immediately looked up whether our public library could provide anything - quickly. I thought I needed to follow up on this very interesting person. This work has turned up as expected - complex, difficult to read at times, difficult to cope with at times. What I really liked was that the essence of her stories, the plots, were never explained, just plumped there at your feet to figure out. All the clues were there, i.e. were given to you over the course of the story, but they were never explained. She did not feel she had to explain and she obvisouly did not want to explain. So they were, difficult to work out, so basically very much life-like. What I did not like was that there was an awful lot of big (exaggerated?) emotions to go around in such a little book. Things weighed too much, life was too big, heavy and scratchy. Also dark, but that was ok, since life is sometimes dark. But the gravity of issues sometimes seemed to be near that ending point of not being able to stand... anything. Possibly this is what highly sensitive people feel like, so this made it more visible for us hard unfeeling lot. In her reading/stand up, A.L. advised against going to readings and actually meeting the writers with a provocative suggestion one surely did not want to meet any one of them, because they were such difficult people, and books are there for a reason - in order not to meet them. Well, it did not work in her case. Her person made me want to read what she had to say in her books, and I am sure there is much more out there, so I will definitely look up more, since it is all very very clever and very interesting.
Favourite quotes (there are long stretches too, but that would be too much):
Pg. 16 Going up to the bedroom had been unwise - she might have been there, too, resting on her pillow, or undressing and having some kind of large emotion that she didn't want observed.
Pg. 38 Sell organic food and imitation bacon and suddenly folk thought you'd tolerate anything. [will ask you to hang up all kinds of leaflets]: Poorly looking lunatics would rush at you from miles around with news of whatever had saved them from themselves. ( )

The back cover blurb of What Becomes makes explicit reference to the old Jimmy Ruffin (among many other performers) hit What Becomes of the Brokenhearted and this collection of short stories does mainly examine fractured or doomed relationships within or outwith marriage. The emblematic story title here would be Whole Family With Young Children Devastated though in the story concerned it actually refers to a notice about a lost pet displayed on local lamp-posts. Two stories are exceptions. Another concerns the careful reconstruction of a new life and relationship after the woman’s husband has died, while As God Made Us is about the camaraderie of a group of ex-soldier amputees and the prejudice they still face.

Kennedy’s style in her short stories is oblique. Very little is stated outright either by her narrators or by the characters but it is all exquisitely, carefully written. The overall sense is of people clinging on, desperate to make connetions.

There was one peculiar phrase where a character was described as, “constructing these laborious smiles which I think were designed to imply he was a dandy youngster and blade about town,” - of which I can only make sense by assuming that similes was the intended word. But if it’s not in fact a typo it’s brilliant. ( )

A. L. Kennedy has proved to be a difficult author to read. Understanding her work does not come with ease, but laboriously through careful reading and re-reading. Probably not what the average reader is looking for.

Elsewhere, I have reviewed A. L. Kennedy's novel Day, which was published in 2007. A stylistic feature of that novel is the use of unspoken asides, different from stream-of-conciousness, and not part of the narrative, like a kind of interior monologue, but very random and very unfocused, very short and often "unedited", i.e. using pretty rude vernacular. In the novel, these unspoken asides appear in italics throughout the book. In Day the apparent function of these "asides" in italics are to convey the sense of experiencing the world from within, i.e. from inside the mind of Alfred Day, the novel's main character.

What becomes is a collection of short stories, published in 2009. Although their publication follows that of Day (2009), it seems more likely that they were written before or at the same time as the novel. In these stories, the author experiments wildly with the use of italics, to represent, what I would call "side-line content". However, the usage and function of italics in these the stories is not constant, sometimes it seems to represent "interior monologue" (as in "Vanish"), sometimes "stream-of-consciousness" and sometimes, more standard, "for emphasis", to high-light",or simply to denote title, etc. Every possible use of italics is deployed. These stories could best be described as the author's experiment to discover how to use italics in an innovative way in prose, to convey other strands of narrative, or side-line dialogue.

While in Day this new narrative technique works very well, creating a new experience in reading, the scope of the short stories is too short, to make it work successfully. The stories are simply too short, to make this style feature "attractive". In fact, reading many of the stories gave me a literal headache, and there were many stories I did not really grasp the meaning of. In the case of the novel, it is worthwhile to reread and go back, but in short stories that seems less rewarding. In most cases I just read on without really "getting it". There was little motivation to do so, as the themes and plot of most stories is very close to real life descriptions. As with Day, this short story collection would mainly be of interest to the literature major, to study the development of style, A. L. Kennedy's style in particular. ( )

Some good stories, especially "As God made us" about war veterans, and there was some humour, but overall too depressing to be engaging, ( )

At times the description is dull, or confusing, and the dialogue can be clichéd, but the ideas behind the short stories in this collection are always interesting - no mean feat. ( )