Critical Essay | Critical Review by Alex Clark

Critical Review by Alex Clark

SOURCE: Clark, Alex. “Jennifer's Song.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4806 (12 May 1995): 20.

In the following review, Clark contends that So I Am Glad further illustrates Kennedy's imaginative and inventive writing style.

Jennifer Wilson is a woman in her mid-thirties, living in Scotland. Her life is a peculiar but familiar mixture of over-control and massive hidden trauma. She has spent a childhood in isolation with her parents, her loneliness made worse by their particular form of abuse—they forced her to be a voyeur to their sex life—from which she has only been released by their deaths in a car crash. Her strategy for survival since then has been clear: she has erased all traces of emotional spontaneity from her personality, and cultivated her sang-froid so well that she no longer believes herself capable of any genuine feeling. She pathologizes emotion to such an extent that she sees other people...
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