Customer Reviews

Paradise

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Paradise is one of those books I wanted to enjoy more than I did. Stylistically, it's simply fantastic-the language, the poetic phrasing, the original descriptions and metaphors, the structure and its allusions to the stations of the cross are all evidence of a prose stylist at the top of her craft. Much of the writing is simply gorgeous. But unfortunately it all felt to little purpose to me. The whole was less than the sum of its parts.
One expects a bit of distance from a book whose main character and narrator is a drunk. There's the inherent distance of not really understanding what that entails (beyond the stock cliches which Kennedy does a fine job of avoiding), the distance of willful repulsion ("who would or could live like that?"), and the narrative distance of having a story communicated by someone who slips in and out of time and who is often attempting (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) to anesthetize herself.
But there was more than that operating here and though I can't put my finger on just why, I never felt really pulled in by Hannah's story, never compelled by either the sorrows of her life (the fall from middle-class grace, the on-and-off love affair with a fellow drunk, the on-and-off affair with gainful employment or detoxification, etc.) or its accordant joys (the drink obviously, the aforementioned love affair, the recognition that her family still somehow loves her). More and more I found myself appreciating not what I was reading but how it was being communicated.
The book never really took off for me and then noticeably slowed past the two-thirds point. It seemed over long by then and somewhat repetitive, even if that repetitiveness was part of the point. And since we usually know how these things go, there wasn't much suspense or much to compel interest with regard to the two major storylines--her affair with a Robert, a drunken dentist with issues beyond the drinking-- and the various attempts at detox. The stations of the cross references were interesting in a literary fashion (though a bit too blunt at times), but again, never seemed to add much to the story beyond that and so felt more crafted, more artificial, than part of the natural story.
In the end, it's impossible not to appreciate Kennedy's talent, but I found it nearly as impossible to care much for its use here. If I were to recommend a moving book about a few drunks, I'd much more highly recommend Ironweed by William Kennedy, who also displayed a flair for language but wove for me a much more human story from it.

I've enjoyed some of the books in the "Customers who also bought this book" list, so I picked this one up. The back of the book touts the amazing prose and supreme literary talents of the author. I read about 1/3 of it and I couldn't appreciate any of this terrific prose because the action seemed to be going absolutely nowhere at all. I had a series of disjoined snapshots of an alcoholic's life, all of which were just sad and confusing as a whole. I couldn't see where this was all going, and I wasn't compelled to keep turning the pages.

This book may be technically amazing, and you could admire each sentence on a stand-alone basis, but fantastic literary devices do not a good story make. There wasn't enough cohesive action for me to want to stick with Hannah and her story. I'm sorry I don't have more information to offer, but no one else has reviewed this book yet, so I wanted to get some comments out there.

As for the "funny" parts, I didn't find any of those in the 180 pages I read.

This is a remarkable novel. Kennedy is a superb stylist--each sentence gives me a pang that I didn't write it myself--and the narrator is funny and endearing and maddening even as the story she's telling gets bleaker and bleaker. I really, really liked this book. (I liked Augusten Burroughs' "Dry" too; that's a great story, well-told, though he's not on this level as a stylist; but this, though it's fiction rather than memoir, is ultimately a more realistic and painful picture of life as an alcoholic. Not to knock Burroughs. Read that too! But this novel's amazing in a completely different way.)

It's apparent, reading other reviews of Kennedy's book, Paradise, that for many people good literature is that which reinforces their own ideas about the world, the happy ending which leaves them pleasantly sated being essential. (Why, exactly, we would be interested in the opinions of people who didn't read or only got part way through the book is beyond me.) That is adamantly, not what this book is about. It is an unflinching look over the edge, a story which harbors no illusions about a happy ending. It is also, literature of the highest sort, a searing look at how everyday life can blend into madness.
It is the first person account of one Hannah Luckraft, a thirty-ish year old woman whose alcoholism is either medication for an intractable depression or the cause of it. While sections of the book have been described as humorous, it is humor of the wry sort, the I-know-what-she-means sort (i.e. having been there myself,) it is nothing close to comic. It is the story of an addiction in all its technicolor black and white, its unanswerable needs and inevitable debasement. Kennedy's knowledge seems to be of the insider's sort implying either an extraordinary ability to write about her own experience or an enviable capacity for imagination. Whichever it reflects, this book is superb.

I don't think I have ever before seen a book reviewed by Amazon readers in which ALL the opinions, from praise to outrage, seemed true to the work and a helpful indication of one's likely mixed reactions to it. For this is certainly an unpleasant book, but darned well written. Thirty-something Hannah Luckraft is an alcoholic, living on a variety of low-level jobs, at odds with her family, and enabled through an affair with a fellow drinker, a dentist. What she does have, though, is the gift of the gab -- a brilliantly witty commentary on life, cynical but often insightful and occasionally even beautiful. Even the sex, though graphic, is described in an original way. Humor, I suppose, is one of the mechanisms that some drunks use to prevent reality from intruding; look at Brendan Behan. But it has the opposite effect on this reader, drawing him in to a life that he would rather have no part of.

I have to admit that Kennedy's writing is also technically intriguing. From the start, Hannah's story is sometimes interrupted by short blackouts. Towards the end, however, events seem to occur out of sequence, to repeat and overlap, making one question even the apparent simplicity of the earlier writing, but taking one further still into the self-deluding mind of this brilliant woman.

What they call stylistic fireworks, a totally dislocated non-linear narrative jumping between reality (perhaps), dream (certainly), and metaphor (I think). Less redemption than "Last Exit to Brooklyn", and less action too, but a similar level of bleak despair.

Ms Kennedy must have expected Americans to dislike the book in exactly the ways expressed here; mainly because of the protagonist's attitude towards her own life: She knows it's awful, but she is unwilling to change it.
(That's not an un-American attitude, mind you: millions of American alcoholics will agree.)
Somehow she seems to feel that being an alcoholic is what she is; especially the destructive bits. The mastery of Kennedy's book is in the way in which she makes the reader almost understand that attitude.
This makes it a book for people who want to find out something new about the world. A book, as Kafka said, that is an axe for the frozen sea inside us.

"I don't hate the reader, but I do want to drag them into hell's mouth - it's good for them."

This is a comment that came right out of the writer's mouth. She apparently was dead set on making good on this pledge because boy-oh-boy does the reader go to hell with main character Hannah, a seemingly somewhat attractive alcoholic who lives to destroy herself.

Growing up in Asbury Park, NJ, I'd seen lots and lots of derelicts and drunks, homeless people and crackheads. Their lot in life seemed so far gone to me that it couldn't be very much unlike looking into total darkness; making a home in a wasteland where carbon monoxide took the place of oxygen. Well, compared to Hannah, it seemed like they had it easy.

Literally bathing in the throes of human imperfection, Hannah is a puppet and Kennedy is the evil master pulling the strings. The poor girl spends her entire existence frequenting pub after pub after pub, blacks out all the time and never ceases to amaze in her efforts to destroy herself day in and day out. And the darnedest thing is, she manages to make it all sound like a hysterically good time. Witty, ironic and funny, puppet-master Kennedy has a ball killing narrator Hannah with the Devil's water: booze.

I call Kennedy the puppet-master because it seems that she is the only reason Hannah does these things to herself. I found myself asking why, why, why over and over again. With every hallucination and after every binge, it becomes less and less clear what her motivations are. It all seems contingent upon the whims of the writer - the malicious demon dead-set on taking us on a rollercoaster ride through her firey neighborhood at the expense of this hapless figment of her imagination.

Somehow through all these terrible experiences, Hannah meets the man of her dreams, though she doesn't know it. This is Robert, a hard drinking mix between Cary Grant and Dean Martin with all their skeletons thrown in as a package deal. He doesn't want to change her, just love her and be loved by her. That's cool and all but he sometimes seems to cramp her style because she'd much rather be wasted than be in love, already having chosen a threesome with Jim Beam and Captain Morgan. She loves being with him, undoutedly, but there's just something lacking about their love affair and I applaud the puppet-master for making that so eloquently subtle.

There's not a lot of story here, but what there is is beautifully written and well-told without overdoing it. She drinks, she rehabs, she drinks, she gets a boyfriend, she drinks, she rehabs, end of story...and not with the happiest of endings either. I'll tell you, if it weren't so funny from time to time, this is one book that might drive you to drink. Now and then, it's as sunless as "Under The Volcano" but more amusing than "Dry." If this floats your boat, go out and rent "Leaving Las Vegas," "Days Of Wine And Roses," or "The Lost Weekend." All tough ones to watch.

I was given the book on the recommendation that A.L Kenndey was a brilliant writer, and while her style and invention is admirable and engaging it failed to compensate for the lack of meaning to Hannah's story. Sure, the reader gets into the uncomfortable skin of an alcoholic, and it's a visceral, painful skin, but after the first half of the book when the reader has experienced the binges, hangovers, deceptions and debasements that Hannah endures - I wanted out. I kept reading though, hoping for something more, perhaps some sort of better understanding of what drove Hannah who came from a comfortable middle class family, to inflict so much self destruction and misery on herself. I suspect the author deliberately eschewed the idea that trauma might account for addiction, wanting to avoid the psychological banality of explanation. But without adequate characterisation, Hannah just becomes a vehicle for stylistic invention and experimentation, her acts increasingly tedious as she rattles through the shattered landscape and lives she inhabits.

I feel I'm entitled to give this book a review because I did force myself to read the entire book and it never got any better. There were, perhaps, three humorous lines and terribly confusing passages throughout. I also agree that while some sentences may be well written, that doesn't mean the story comes together as a whole.

Part of the reason I read this book was because of the endorsement of the wonderful writer, Jennifer Haigh, but I'm wondering if it was taken out of context, hence the dot dot dot's. I also find the depiction of an alcoholic to be as fantasized as that of James Frey.

I am so relieved to be finished with this book -- I feel that a great weight has been lifted.