SOURCE: Loose, Julian. “Glasgow über Alles.” London Review of Books 15, no. 13 (8 July 1993): 18.

In the following excerpt, Loose comments that the ultra-violent and bizarre death of Colin in Looking for the Possible Dance is a jarring departure from the rest of the volume's understated prose style.

This sense of a city crowded with narratives is echoed in A. L. Kennedy's short story “The Role of Notable Silences in Scottish History”, where she describes walking through Glasgow as ‘strolling across a book, something big and Victorian with plenty of plots. It makes you wonder who's reading you.’ By contrast, Kennedy's own fiction is intimate in scale and distinctively modern in emphasis, shrugging off the consolations of plot for an uncompromising focus on the messy lives most of us lead, lives that ‘leave absolutely nothing behind’. Her first novel, Looking for the Possible Dance, suggests she also has less faith than...