Serious Sweet
By A.L. Kennedy, Little A, 479 pages, $25
Americans who are bewildered, disheartened or infuriated by the recent electoral politics (check all that apply) will recognise in “Serious Sweet” a British version of the same malaise. Although A.L. Kennedy’s novel came into being before the Brexit vote and the subsequent pratfalls of so many British politicians, her Londoners have already lost faith in the machinery of the state and are spoiling for a fight. Arrogance and dysfunction are everywhere in government; in fact they are encouraged. In the Ministry of Justice, “it is most especially and stridently the policy to know nothing about anything at all.” And: “What is Parliament? An institution designed to prevent any activist from staying active.” And again, speaking of those who administer (that is, diminish) government assistance: “If you’re poor enough to need benefits, you must be doing something wrong.”
So thinks Jon Sigurdsson, embittered civil servant of long tenure, a “passed-over man”, whose work duties consist of planning “strategies to save the [expletive] of [expletive].”
Jon, at 59, has achieved a stolid respectability and competence, though not enough status to prevent his horrible boss, Harry Chalice, from treating him with contempt. Jon is also leaking confidential government data and sitting on at least one bombshell secret.
A certain kind of book would ordinarily follow from this, but Jon has another clandestine activity afoot. He advertises his willingness to send “Expressions of Affection and Respect” to yearning and lonely women, who pay him for his efforts. Divorced, or more accurately cast aside by his unfaithful wife, he views these idealised, anonymous love letters as the only sort of intimacy he can undertake without fear of failure. In a neat bit of plotting, the post office box he rents for his correspondence also serves as cover for his secret-passing.
Jon is one half of the novel’s unlikely romantic couple. The other is Meg Williams, 45, a defrocked accountant now getting by as a part-time worker in an animal shelter. She is celebrating, or rather taking note of, her first year of sobriety and is trying to make it to one year and one month. She has signed up to receive Jon’s letters and she writes to him in return. Nowadays those wishing to be gratified by strangers most often turn to the internet, but Meg and Jon value handwritten communications on real paper. The individual and the personal have been so overwhelmed by impervious modern life that fragile souls such as them struggle to be heard and seen.
Meg tracks Jon down at the post office, and the two of them cast aside their pseudonyms and embark on a tentative, often very funny courtship. They meet for lunch and make the mistake of ordering pasta that cannot be tidily consumed. Jon takes Meg on a date to a monkey rescue facility. They send each other texts that come perilously close to baby talk. “Every night at midnight,” Meg says, “we wish each other sweet and we know what that means.” Presumably they do, but “sweet” covers a lot of imprecise ground, meaning not only affection but also that which is beautiful, benevolent or hopeful. It’s two steps forward and one back for Jon and Meg, and the central question of the novel is whether they can overcome their crippling, self-inflicted anxieties and take any real comfort in each other.
Much of their challenge is trying to end up in the same place at the same time. The action of the novel covers a single 24 hours, during which assignations are planned, then postponed, as Jon’s cellphone keeps redirecting him with orders from Harry Chalice, then a crisis call from his grown daughter, whom Jon must (ineffectually) attempt to comfort.
For Meg, who is all too ready to see herself as unlovable and deserving of rejection, each cancelled tryst undermines her and threatens to undo her sobriety. And Jon is increasingly persuaded there will be ruinous consequences should he continue spilling secrets. Is he moral or treasonous? Some of the energy goes out of the question since the government is portrayed as so wrongheaded and unresponsive to its citizens; in this light, it richly deserves betrayal.
Kennedy’s prose is lively and assured. (“Serious Sweet” was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.) Some of the best writing comes in the depiction of London as a city where even the architecture has turned hostile and the ultrawealthy rule everything. The pathology of alcoholism is rendered with particular acuteness. Many short, appealing chapters are vignettes of ordinary life in which people are seen being helpful, charitable or just happy. These have been observed and collected by Meg as talismans of “sweetness”, evidence to argue against despair.
The novel-as-single-day has a lot of precedent, notably “Ulysses” and “Mrs Dalloway”. But any day is made up of unremarkable moments. (The hyperviolent television series of a few years back, “24”, is the exception that proves the rule.) And Joyce and Woolf are immeasurably tough acts to follow. Any such minute-by-minute account puts great emphasis on the inner lives of its protagonists, here offered up as extensive italicised streams of consciousness accompanying every small and large event. Neither Jon nor Meg is able to sit in a taxi, process a workplace question or drink coffee without an accompanying torrent of internal commentary, most often of the self-doubting sort.
This can be effective, as when we see Meg agonising over taking a cake to her office and imagining which of her inadequacies the different choices will reveal. Or when we are privy to Jon’s internal strategising at the same time he attempts to throw Harry Chalice off the scent about the leaked data or lure a journalist into taking the bait. But there is also a great deal of repetition. When Meg is in the mood to berate herself as a stupid cow, she goes on for a few pages. Interior monologue allows for side trips and random musings, a temptation that Kennedy does not resist. And there is a lot of interiority to get through, since “Serious Sweet” is not brief. This is an ambitious book, but often an exhausting one.
More important, this self-absorption not only gets in the way of the characters’ best interests but can also be exasperating to a reader. Meg shrinks from the most harmless interactions and wills her isolation. The book opens as Jon tries to free a trapped bird from a net, a task he is unable to complete without thoroughly exercising his neuroses. Just get on with it, man, you want to tell him. You’re not the one in the actual net. Subjectivity is mutable and unreliable. Jon, if seen here from the outside, might figure in one of Meg’s uplifting vignettes. And it’s possible the people in the vignettes are suffering their own private torments.
The book reaches an ending that seems fitting, given these quirky and damaged people. (At one point Jon locks himself in the bathroom and won’t come out. Meg kicks the door.) It is even a hopeful ending, in a hard-won fashion. But it’s been a very long day.
–New York Times News Service
Jean Thompson’s most recent novel is “She Poured Out Her Heart”.
