Paradise

Paradise

by A.L. Kennedy

Knopf, 284 pp., $25

There is contemporary fiction about addiction, and then there is Paradise, the fifth novel from A.L. Kennedy, which stands out for its bitter wit, its painful truth-telling, and the narcotic quality of its author's limber, serpentine prose. Like the chemical undertow that its protagonist, thirtysomething Hannah Luckraft, compulsively seeks, the book itself is by turns rapturously beautiful and horrifying to experience – a complete immersion into the world of the drinker – and it flows with the caustic warmth and viscosity of Bushmills. Kennedy begins with a blackout: Hannah surfaces through a haze to find herself away from home, holding a motel-room key and eating breakfast with a wan-faced and tiresome stranger whose wispy reddish hairs she later finds clogging the drain in her shower. From this inauspicious starting point, we follow Hannah through her modern life: her job selling cardboard cartons; her addictive and passionate communion with an alcoholic lover; the ruins of her family relationships; and her stints in rehab, observed with shrewdness and absurdist humor. This is not a book to give your friends after they graduate from Hazelden. This is a book that makes terrifyingly real the thirst inside, the relentless clamoring of a soul desperate to pull a disappearing act. Yet at the same time Hannah seeks redemption in her relationship with Robert, the charming drunken dentist, to achieve "those beautiful, uncommon chances to truly search another human being and be truly searched by them, to shift shapes in each other's company." When drunk, of course. Paradise is not plot-driven, but it has some surprises in store, and untwisting the threads of its narrative is a perversely pleasurable process. At times Kennedy grinds Hannah into the grit of the mundane – she shakes and sweats through Mass with her teetotaling brother, buoyed by cough syrup – and, at times, Hannah becomes disconnected from reality, literally lost in carnivalesque delirium. Without even breaking a sweat with her craft, Kennedy captures under glass the phantasmagoria of alcoholism, turning it this way and that to show off its iridescence and poisonous, seductive beauty.