The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Original Bliss by A.L. KennedyEamonn Wall
A. L. Kennedy. Original Bliss. Knopf, 1999. 214 pp. $21.00.
Original Bliss, a strange and unpredictable novel, explores and uncovers the various levels of abuse which Helen Brindle has been subjected to throughout her life, and moves toward a surprising salvation. As a result of a strict religious upbringing and involvement in an unsatisfactory marriage to a cold and abusive man, she is emotionally crippled. Her life changes after seeing Edward Gluck, a pop psychologist, on the Open University. She writes to him and they arrange a meeting at a conference. Gluck, addicted to hard-core pornography, is equally crippled emotionally. However, the relationship they begin moves forward, tentatively at first, and allows both of them to conquer together their parallel dysfunctions. In the end, this is a novel which becomes, surprisingly, a compelling and convincing love story.
Kennedy has written a richly understated and beautifully plotted novel which examines not only the surfaces of addiction—to violence, denial, and pornography—but also the mangled roots which allow these to grow. On one level, Kennedy explores a small world which will be familiar to the readers of Barbara Pym while, on another, her treatment of spousal abuse is reminiscent of what Roddy Doyle achieved in The Woman Who Walked into Doors. But she delves deeper than those two writers by locating the areas in the physical and psychological worlds from which these terrors emerge. In the end we are left with a finely rounded portrait of both the abusers and the abused with light cast on the forces that drive and manipulate human beings. Original Bliss is slow-moving, painful, and disturbing. It is also full of truth and executed with great verve. [Eamonn Wall]