"Original Bliss," A.L. Kennedy

"He perched on a chair and sat rubbing his jaw and looking beyond her shoulder. Helen had thought of sitting, but that didn't seem quite the right thing, so she waited as she was. She stood and braced herself against herself and the roiling need that was stroking the meat between her ribs and then dipping its head clear inside her, striking a light. It seemed superfluous that she should move in any visible way."

I figured I would like A.L. Kennedy when I read an article in "The Guardian," in which she explained her resolutely literary attitude toward fiction by saying, "It's like anal sex. If that's what I want to do to you and you're not into it, then go away, because that's what will keep happening." Because I am knee deep in my own book, trying to figure out how to lasso the narrative and inject--without killing--the prose with "craftedness" (a word leveled at Kennedy's work, and a state not easy to avoid for someone who writes mostly poetry) and because her ferocity appeals to me, I thought I should read a novel of hers soon. Again because of the subject matter of my own book, I thought I would seek out "Original Bliss," the story of two psychologically warped people who forge a relationship. The books was astonishing in myriad ways: it was tightly structured and narratively economic in a way that I have trouble pulling off myself. It it probably technically close to a novella, and seems like it marries the best features of the short story with the novel. Kennedy, as other people have often remarked, also writes beautifully about desire and sexuality. In this case, that writing is refracted through the consciousness of Helen Brindle, who is plagued by numerous existential crises. It sounds crass to reduce Helen to labels--she is such a fully live character--but she is clearly submissive to an abusive husband, insecure, and obsessed with the absence of God, around whom her inner life once revolved until she felt God desert her. She hears a self-help guru named Edward Gluck (something like L. Ron Hubbard, perhaps; his work is nebulous, but has to do with "the Process," a way of transforming the brain and the self through thought) and attends a conference to meet him. The first third of the book was uncertain going for me. Edward seemed pompous and cartoonish initially, and as the book opened up toward the middle, I could see that this was Kennedy's intention. It is not until Edward admits an obsession with pornography (and a mirroring disorder to Helen's lack of self-worth) that he becomes full color: hesitant, stammering, gentle, romantic. The book is a long tense held breath of conflicted desire between the two of them. Helen's self-punishing streak and her pathological search for God and moral framework prevents her from committing adultery, though she is still crucified for her sins by husband, first when he finds Helen's postcards from Edward, and then, in the book's climax, after she has returned from the sanctuary of Edward's London flat. The need for ultimate confession dogs her until the chapter in which she shows her husband the evidence of another man's sexual attention. The point of view switches from the third person limited to the second person, a sort of echo of Helen's saint-inspired out-of-body episode, beaten to near death by her jealous spouse.
And the writing! Bring on the craftedness, say I.