A lifetime of lost weekends

William BURROUGHS called heroin a perfect consumer product; as you consume it, it consumes you. It might be said that any addictive substance creates a circular system best symbolized by a snake eating its tail. For fiction writers who choose an all-consuming consumption as their subject, the problem is how to make the obsession as interesting and convincing to readers as it is to the characters. In the case of novels with alcoholic narrators, the problem is compounded by nagging questions: How much trust does a boozy storyteller deserve? Are tales told by inebriates inherently unreliable? Can an incoherent person articulately describe his experience even as he undergoes it?

A.L. Kennedy, a Scotswoman who has written seven previous novels, chooses not so much to answer these questions as to finesse them with style. By turns funny and poignant, tender and annihilating, her prose has undeniable power, yet it sometimes appears to be at odds with her story and often undermines its verisimilitude.

“Paradise” is narrated by Hannah Luckraft, an unrepentant alcoholic who loses her job selling cardboard boxes and goes to work in a pub. Curiously, Hannah sounds like a gifted novelist in full command of her senses, not to mention her craft. Even emerging from a blackout into a harrowing hangover, she remains vividly aware of her surroundings and preternaturally able to describe them. “The carpet is liberally scattered with a sort of bread-related dandruff: each table has its dusting, too, along with a thread or so of unconvincing foliage in a throttled vase.”

Hannah’s downhill life consists of lost weekends, long benders, squalid sex with strangers and rhapsodic sex with Robert, an alcoholic dentist with whom she’s in love. They travel to Dublin and London for the sole purpose of getting plastered in different circumstances. They end up heavingly sick, urinating in alleys, losing one another, then reuniting over whiskey bottles. Robert has already done a stint in a Canadian rehab clinic. Eventually, Hannah’s family sends her to one as well, and she recognizes the pain she has inflicted on her parents: “Now when we meet we are not people: only unfortunate reminders, bodies of bad evidence. The money they kept on lending me, the money that I took, the falling asleep with my face in the Sunday lunch, the endless trail of lies and breakages and stains and the dirt and the damp and the unnamed disease of myself, at large in their house....”

Though she professes to feel remorse, she soon tires of rehab and fleeces an Alzheimer’s patient of money to fly home to Scotland. Back with Robert, she stays off booze for a time. Unfortunately, when clearheaded, she begins to sound almost sitcom-cute. She and Robert zing each other with one-liners that would be mildly amusing if you didn’t realize the depth of their wretchedness and their indifference to others. Then in a bit of post-coital honesty, Robert admits he has a wife and daughter. Hannah, usually so quick on the uptake, dumbly asks, “Is that a problem?” He claims it isn’t and glibly maintains it’s also no problem for her to resume drinking. “I knew you could manage stopping.... And I knew you could manage starting again.”

What Hannah cannot manage is the news that Robert is leaving her. He implies that he’s reconciling with his wife, but that’s another lie. As he disappears into the ether, Hannah disappears into the bottle. This time, she wakes in a hospital bed and finds that “I’d been having trouble with my brain.” Yet neither that nor the delirium tremens damages her style. In extremis she remains a pointillist landscape artist, a poet of despair, a drunk who can control nothing except her prose. “I’ve been given the stern-but-fair talks by professional people, and I agree with what they’ve said: I crave mood alteration: this is my trouble, I will accept: my natural mood is of the has-to-be-altered type.”

Though some might praise Hannah as being her own harshest critic, utterly without pity, one could also observe that her criticism never leads to true self-awareness and her candor stops well short of acknowledging the need to change. It’s difficult to understand how someone so intelligent could remain so blind, just as it is to accept that someone so capable of evoking her predicament could remain so powerless. Perhaps these paradoxes are the pathological essence of alcoholism, but in the end they make for a narrator who sorely strains a reader’s patience and credulity. *