To the end

Kate Kennedy looks at violence through many eyes

By Tim O’Sullivan

End Over End. Soho Press, Inc; New York, New York; $24.

KATE KENNEDY: her first novel has the feel of artfully crafted woodwork.

It is the story of a murdered 14-year-old girl, subject matter the author herself describes as “harrowing.” The book is at once hard to put down and emotionally difficult to read, a heartfelt insight into the normally ignored world of rural teens. The story is told from twenty-eight different points of view and reminds us that even one violent act can affect a myriad of lives. Kate Kennedy, a creative writing teacher at Portland High School for the past 18 years, has just published her first novel, end over end.

“When I first started to want to write a book that involved violence and teenagers I researched a bunch of different cases,” Kennedy says, “but I had a terrible time figuring out how to tell the story. I found what I really wanted to know, what drove me, was wanting to know what it felt like to be the various people involved in a murder.”

Thus, the story is told through the eyes of the victim, her family and friends, the accused murderers and their families, the prosecuting and defense lawyers, witnesses, police investigators, a newspaper reporter, a juror, the mortician. The teacher has done her homework.

While the novel is written in the third person, the point of view changes with each chapter, much like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The piecing together of these voices gives the book the feel of artfully crafted woodwork. Through the changing story-tellers the captivating plot moves consistently forward, and the characters become tangible as they tell their own version of the story and are then perceived through so many other pairs of eyes.

While teaching at Portland, Kennedy has had students with siblings murdered, and students who spent time at the youth correctional facility. Teenage girls who do not act out, troubled but abandoned, particularly drove her to write this book. These are girls hiding and ignored, destined to be lost, or murdered.

She also says that working with teenagers lent itself to the form of her book — each day Kennedy is privy to the writing, perspective, and opinion of dozens of teenagers. A character in end over end, Mrs. Cadenza the health teacher, encourages her students to write, hoping it will help them through the trauma in their lives. Such a character might seem like a direct representation of the author. When asked if she is Mrs. Cadenza, however, Kennedy gives a revealing answer.

“I’d say I am and I’m not,” Kennedy explained, citing specific differences. “But her consciousness, her wanting to help these kids, and her feeling of ‘oh my god what am I doing here,’ I’d say that’s very much who I am. But probably for every character there are some touchstone pieces of myself.”

Despite the intriguing plot, the palpable imagery and the expertly-painted back woods New England setting, it is these characters that carry the book. The reader is immersed in the world of rural teenagers, in “the Barstow Pit, out beyond even the last ripples of town. It’s alive with noise, headlights shooting beams, car radios turned full blast to either heavy metal or country . . . but at the edges of the pit, it’s truly dark and the stars are throbbing.” And with a turn of the page Kennedy takes you into the psyche of a rookie police officer, a woman struggling to maintain composure as she investigates her first murder scene: “Think of lines, think of right angles. Don’t swirl the torn hank of hair into a ponytail, the melting address book into phone numbers, girlfriends, whispers.”

“What I have to offer as a person, teacher, and writer is that I can really get into other people’s minds,” Kennedy says.

There is “Another deep reason for me starting to write this book when I did,” Kennedy explains. “I started in January ’95, which is when our daughter turned 14, which is the age of this girl I wanted to write about. I imagined my daughter dying, although she has nothing in common with the character, but kids are kids.”

It is from this perspective that Kennedy renders heart wrenching chapters about the victim’s family and those closest to her. The reader feels the terror of a parent who has lost a child and has just heard that the remains have been decomposing in the nearby woods: “Wild dogs. The beaks of birds. Help me, Florence cried. Teeth. Claws. The tracks of crows across her face . . . She reached up. The hope of scissors. A thousand redtops, she’d skin them alive, dip their feathers in her own life’s blood, then feed them to the crows herself if it would bring color back to those pieces of child.”

end over end, and paragraphs such as these, is a testament to Kennedy’s skill, but it did not come easily. This is her first published novel, but the fourth she has written.

“I liked all of my books, but I think this is the best written of them,” she says. “But I had high hopes for all four and so did an agent. Publishing, as wonderful and affirming as it is, is not the end all be all, and it’s not writing.”

Kennedy describes the rejection of her past writings as depressing, humiliating and painful, but says that the motivation to write is always there. She told a story about a high school basketball team in North Dakota that made an improbable trip to the state finals. They lost, but they had provided themselves and their town with a season of joy. Kennedy says the point of the story is that “what matters most is the passionate pursuit of what you love.”

“Nobody is happier than I am when I’m writing a book,” Kennedy states with a smile, “there’s just no better feeling, so you have to put up with the risk of feeling like a failure, but its worth it.”

Tim O’Sullivan is a former student of Kate Kennedy’s, and can be reached at timanddenise@earthlink.net