215 PAGES

BY SYLVIA BROWNRIGG | "I am a person who has no faith. I'm over. That's that," announces Mrs. Brindle of Glasgow to cybernetics professor Edward E. Gluck. The two are the central characters in the funny, affecting new novel by acclaimed Scottish writer A.L. Kennedy. Mrs. Brindle's God has abandoned her for no reason, and the loss has left her distraught, up nights watching educational television in order to distract herself from the empty night -- and from the sinister, violent attentions of Mr. Brindle.

It is on television that Mrs. Brindle first sees Gluck, chatting in a friendly way about masturbation and a form of EST-like personal improvement called the Process. Struck by his theories, Mrs. Brindle travels to Stuttgart to waylay him at a conference and seek his help. Gluck offers her a few lines of self-help wisdom, and that might have been that, if it weren't for the odd spark that lights between these two stray souls, who find in each other someone who recognizes the experience of being "numb; absent but functioning."

It is only after Mrs. Brindle -- Helen, eventually -- comes to trust Edward as a spiritual friend that she learns the distressing source of the professor's numbness: He is severely addicted to hardcore pornography. Though it fills him with self-disgust, he has to interrupt his busy lecture schedule frequently to jerk off to violent videos and magazines. His confession of this to Helen horrifies her, and she returns to Glasgow from their chaste Stuttgart encounters determined to remain faithful to the terrible Mr. Brindle, who not only hits her but also mocks her for her questions of faith.

How Edward and Helen lead each other out of their differently painful plights forms the narrative of this risky, moving fiction. Helen is wary of her feelings for Edward, realizing "that damaged people often sought each other out and fell in love with their mutual diseases, to the detriment or destruction of their hopes and personalities." From early on, however, the reader has faith that Edward and Helen are meant for each other; if there's a weakness to the novel, it's that this conviction comes perhaps too easily, and that Edward's transition from porn addict to gentle, patient savior has an improbable glow about it.

But these are small qualms about a book that is alive with an edgy, original language and dark comedy. ("Changing guards and ravens and the homelessly mad -- that was the capital," is Helen's summary of a brief spell she spends in London.) Kennedy has a beautiful way with the lonely and the bereft, and a keen sense of the pleasurable strangenesses of sexuality. She writes with a vivid synesthesia: The whites of Edward's eyes "blare loudly"; Helen experiences "a pale, metallic sensation in her limbs." Kennedy's rare gifts have been evident in her four earlier prize-winning fictions, and her publication in the United States is long overdue. Along with her peers Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner, she is part of a group of writers who suggest that Scotland is, these days, home of the literary brave.
SALON | Jan. 14, 1999

Sylvia Brownrigg's first novel, "The Metaphysical Touch," will be published later this year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She is a frequent contributor to Salon.