![]() ![]() Kennedy is a bundle of laughs all the way. However it would be wrong to leave you with the impression that A.L. So then we had the absurd situation of Ms Kennedy speaking on the pitfalls of portraying sex, whether on screen or in writing, in a church, which cracked her up herself - can't believe I'm talking about this in a church, and my mother a lay Methodist preacher and my father a church organist - an atheist church organist, but a church organist nonetheless. For three weeks each year, she teaches creative writing at Warwick University, and because, perhaps, of the boldness of her own writing, she tends to get from her students their attempts at the more physical aspects of love. Kennedy performed the whole sex shop extract on Thursday, which led on to a question from the presenter about how to write about sex. If I like penises, might I not be assumed to hope the flavour of a penis will be penis, which is to say not too much of a flavour, ideally just this subtle, unflavoured pleasantness and that isn't a problem, how could that be a problem? I don't feel that my experience of oral sex is intended to be primarily culinary.Īs the protagonist says: I am lost, but not that lostĪ.L. For many reasons, my opinion was in favour of not both. You like penises, you like chocolate, why not both? And it goes on: after the fake vaginas, we get to the chocolate-flavoured condoms. So how much more delicate the excruciating coded message in giving a fake vagina to someone? What rich potential hidden agenda opens up there? Ms Kennedy goes into a riff that had me chortling alone on my sofa at home, and the audience in Cologne in gales of whooping laughter. I mean we all know how we wonder about the kind of sub-text that might be going on, or might be seen to be going on, if we give something as innocuous as shower gel to a friend. And as she stands in front of the fake vaginas the preposterous sales assistant in this preposterous shop asks the preposterous question For yourself?. Or rather, not sex, but devices engineered - there was a lot of engineering - to mime the effects of sex. Now, let's leave aside how likely this is for now, because these kinds of shops are usually highly recognizable, but as she wanders around what appears to be a big grocer's, trying to ignore the advances of an inopportune and over-zealous sales assistant, she gradually realizes that this is a supermarket full of sex. ![]() So she ducks into the nearest shop to get warm. In the story Baby Blue, which is blue, but only for beginners, no real sex in there, just the toys that people might use if so inclined, or maybe it is an allusion to Bob Dylan? It's all over now? Anyway, there is a woman there who is lost. The laughs are in there to relax the reader so that the contrast, when it comes, is all the more effective. She can be hilariously funny, but as she warned her audience at the Lit Cologne event I attended last Thursday, when her stories turn funny, it's like that bit in Jurassic Park where the children are eating ice cream: you just know that there are man-eating raptors advancing from stage left and right. Kennedy has a wicked sense of the absurd. It's a journey to the interior that is both harrowing and humorous, as he considers the benefit of showing off the old kitchen rather than renovating-it "only quietly asks to be replaced and will shrug when it's knocked to pieces and hauled away and not take it personally one bit." Swarming with memory and moments of grace, All the Rage is Kennedy at her inimitable best.Ī.L. In "Takes You Home," a man tries to sell his apartment, the emptiness of the rooms. a supermarket full of sex." Kennedy hilariously explores the comic possibilities of fake genitalia before landing on a heartbreaking note. "I want to describe my genuine circumstances on the occasion in question, but I can't," confesses the narrator of "Baby Blue," who finds herself "somewhere like a very big grocers. Kennedy's latest collection of stories is an investigation of "certain types of threat and the odder edges of sweet things"-another intense and luscious feast of language from the author of The Blue Book and Paradise. A dozen sharp new stories by one of contemporary fiction's acknowledged masters.Ī. ![]()
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