“Dramatise! Dramatise!” Henry James exhorted in his notebooks and the prefaces to his collected works. When shaping his novels and stories he struggled with the negotiation between what could be conveyed dramatically – the “explosive” material, as he called it – and what needed to be summarised. In the language of the creative writing workshop this complex negotiation has become simplified into the widespread precept: show, don’t tell.
AL Kennedy is a veteran creative writing teacher, which she has written about with great insight and generosity in her book On Writing. She has also, over the course of almost 20 novels and short story collections, proven her talent and its ambition. But perhaps she has tired of creative writing dogma, because for much of We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time she constructs her stories in the most non-dramatic ways possible: this book is an orgy of telling, and it makes for exhausting reading.
Numerous stories that sound engaging in outline are scuttled by their execution. “Even Words Have Meaning” traces a reporter’s journey through north Africa and Europe in the final years of the second world war, but his monologue contains more historical anecdote and second-hand retelling than individual experience; he doesn’t witness the display of Mussolini’s corpse, for example, but recalls talking to someone who did. Only in the very final pages, when the story is more consistently about what he has witnessed, does it become compelling.
“Inappropriate Staring” describes an argument at a zoo between a woman and a xenophobic man who has “a voice invented not so long ago … apparently with the sole intention of more perfectly expressing angry whiteness”. But Kennedy fragments this argument, the story’s main dramatic action, over 31 long pages of internal monologue. In an ironic flourish she gives her prolix narrator the catchphrase “long story” (“And I’m on a kind of break here – long story – not a holiday, but a break”), but the in-joke doesn’t make the story any less bloated.
“New Mexico” revolves around a woman’s discovery that a serial killer murdered her mother. The story takes the form of a podcast monologue, complete with an ad for a fictional luggage company (“I mostly use the Amagordo Travel Purse and the Sioux Falls Carry-on”) that drags on for two pages.
“Am Sonntag” fails for different reasons. A woman who has been liberated from a Nazi camp wakes up in some kind of refugee station, and scraps of her wartime experience and prior life are revealed as she follows the sound of a piano to its source. It’s hard to say for certain if this is a Holocaust story because Kennedy is so vague and sparing with details, and there were after all plenty of activities and identities that consigned individuals to Third Reich concentration camps. But the fact this woman’s whole family was rounded up, and that she is the only survivor, suggests her crime was Jewishness.
The lack of specific detail makes the story feel thin, as do its simplistic insights: “Cafes make you have faith in civil stability. But the monsters like cafes, as well.” The piercing stories of Tadeusz Borowski or Ida Fink, survivors of Auschwitz and the Zbaraż ghetto respectively, are filled with indelible concrete images and affect your emotional weather for days. “Am Sonntag” evaporates as quickly as morning mist, the victim of its own tasteful mournfulness.
The best story here, by some distance, is the one in which showing far outweighs telling. In “Spider”, an academic called Anne is at home with her children. Her German Kurdish husband is out shopping. The family has been receiving anonymous racist threats. Gripped by a sudden fear in the middle of the afternoon, Anne begins turning on every light: “Let’s switch all the lamps on, shall we? Let’s make the whole of the house shine so that everyone can see us being happy when the dark comes.”
This powerful story captures the isolating terror of persecution and provokes that feeling in the reader, rather than merely reporting it from a deadening remove. We are carried through it as if by a strong current. That most of We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time fatally lacks this momentum raises the question why Kennedy should be so determined to renounce the dramatic. For all the telling in these pages she never tells us that.
• We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
