Saint Hiroshima

by Leigh Kennedy

Tricked by her jealous husband into spending two weeks in a fallout shelter, Katie Doheny finds her outlook on life completely altered when she emerges

296 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1990

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some novels spend a very long time on my shelves before suddenly the moment is exactly right for me to read them: they're novels I know are going to offer me a marvelous experience, and I don't want to run the risk of missing out on a single scintilla of that experience through launching myself upon the voyage when the tides aren't quite right, or something. Choose your own cliche: you know what I mean. So for years the books sit there, and on occasion I gaze at them with a loving eye -- sometimes I even pull them down off the shelf and fondle them before putting them back again -- until finally, one day . . .

I bought Saint Hiroshima in the late 1980s, quite probably (shamefaced confession) as a remainder; I see that Leigh kindly signed it to me in '97, but the book was a longstanding possession by then. The other day, soon after I'd finished reading Brian Hall's The Saskiad and was wondering what next to read, I caught sight of the green spine and the old Bloomsbury logo out of the corner of my eye and, bang!, the book was in my hand. After waiting two decades, I read it in a day.

That last sentence tells you quite a lot about how good a book Saint Hiroshima is. It gains its title from an opening sequence, a childhood experience of small-town Katie Doheney: the same day that she's the close-up witness of a horrific traffic accident she hears (yes, hears, because the installer's having difficulty getting the picture to stabilize) a tv programme about the Hiroshima bombing, and the two events become conflated in her mind. Thereafter she has a phobia about The Bomb; the woman who died in the traffic accident, and whose smashed-up body came crashing down right in front of Katie's aghast eyes, becomes a personal archetype, Saint Hiroshima.

The other main protagonist is Phil Benson, a phenomenally talented musician. The two of them are pulled together as if by a force of nature during their adolescence and become teen sweethearts; for the rest of the book they succeed, through happenstance, through lack of self-faith and/or ambition, through folly and through a sort of reverse serendipity, in drifting inexorably further and further apart -- this even when a horrifically cruel trick played on them crams them together for a couple of weeks in a cramped bomb shelter, believing the nuclear holocaust has come. For a long time, though not lovers, they remain each the most important person in the other's life, but by the novel's close I was reminded of that merciless Leonard Cohen throwaway line at the end of his account of a doomed love affair: "I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel. That's all. I don't even think of you that often." Katie and Phil have become, as it were, "oh, just someone I used to know".

The book has a lot more plot than I'm indicating above; but really it's a novel that's almost less concerned with plot than it is about tale-telling -- and the tale-telling is an absolute joy. Saint Hiroshima was well worth the wait.

[Greg Sloman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leigh Kennedy wrote only two novels, this being her last, published in 1987. She draws her two main characters' lives with bravura and empathy. Katie is traumatized by a road accident and the image of the Hiroshima mushroom cloud on TV, while Phil, an outsider in the psychogeography of Missouri, possesses a gift for playing the piano that is disapproved of by his conformist father. Divided into four parts, Saint Hiroshima is a coming-of-age story we explore over the course of three decades. Phil and Katie's lives are profoundly intertwined, undone but never entirely separated as a result of a shared, deeply traumatic experience that binds them forever. The picaresque narrative mainly follows Phil east to study music. His innate idealism, spontaneity, and innocence are challenged along the way by people and events driven by orthodoxy. Phil must either betray his true feelings for conformity at his own expense or not. Finally, humiliated by the wisecracking, street-smart, fatalistic Pam, their past negative experiences become both a source of attraction and disassociation. Leigh Kennedy’s prose is lean, and her dialogue is acutely observed; this is a powerful portrayal of the impact of American ascendancy on ordinary lives and those things that should be cherished, not broken. Is Saint Hiroshima a blessing or a curse?