Learning to live through loss

Leaving the World by Douglas Kennedy. Photo / Supplied

As with all Douglas Kennedy's books, his latest, Leaving The World, is a gripping read.

The plot whips through a series of crises with the timing of a master storyteller as Kennedy pulls readers through his unlikely tale via a series of hooks and clues that slide back and forwards in time. As usual, he has a damned good, up-to-date story to tell.

As usual, this one is long, highly coloured and extremely satisfying. People do dramatic things and make dramatic decisions. There is a lot of packing up the car and running away to desolate towns and beaches and strong gin martinis that I seem to remember from previous Kennedy novels. It is the stuff of great stories, but rarely found in real life where most peoples' lives rumble along for years on end - which is why I guess we read novels like this one.

Kennedy doesn't write about the humdrum day-to-day conversations of ordinary relationships either. What he does write about is the chaotic stuff that goes on inside one person's head. And he is very good indeed at observing and interpreting that.

Although it is well-signalled, it is not until the end of part three that we come to this novel's terrible kernel: the horror of losing a child. Douglas describes the desolation brilliantly.

The hell of never feeling any better, of waking every day then remembering and going under the anguish again. The description is so real and so bleak, I'd dissuade anyone with a 3-year-old from reading it. We all know how 3-year-olds suddenly dash on to driveways. From then on the real message of this story kicks in. By then Jane is in hospital, lips stitched, stomach pumped, after attempting to leave the world for good.

As always with Kennedy, you learn a great deal along the way: this novel offers a short course in mastering the money markets - including how to calculate percentages in your head, the art of library cataloguing, the Bruchner cello concerto, what makes a great martini, the realities of almost-recovering alcoholics and more. But most of all you learn about loss and what it takes to live through it: the punch-in-the-stomach hell of losing all your material goods, then when you thought there was nothing else to lose, having your daughter mown down by a car.

The secret, which is also a recurrence in Kennedy novels: "Go back to work." Although he is a lyrical writer, and some of his descriptions are masterful, I still have trouble with Kennedy's passion for writing in the voice of a woman.

For the first 10 pages of this novel (as I did in The Pursuit of Happiness) I had to convince myself the narrator was a girl. Then either Douglas' voice settled down, or my resistance did, and I began to find his heroine believable. For all that, Jane is unlike any woman I've ever met. Tough, cool, totally capable of living without friends, she is a lesson to us all.

I'm equally sure there are women like her. And the way she deals with what life throws at her makes fascinating reading.

Leaving the World
By Douglas Kennedy (Random House $36.99)

* Carroll du Chateau is an Auckland reviewer.