Finish your breakfast before reading this.

Things could be worse … stapling my scrotum to the flesh of my inner thighs and then performing Scottish country dances until I feel my socks congeal. I think that would be worse.

Thus we are plunged into the tangled and warped mind of A. L. Kennedy's hero, Nathan Staples, a novelist who writes about physical torture, deviancy and murder in order to assuage his anguish at losing the love of his wife and the giving away to a pair of Welsh homosexuals of his beloved daughter. The novel [Everything You Need] is about his redemption through rediscovering ‘the ability to give and receive love’ as the blurb gushingly puts it. The blurb, however, does not tell you that you must follow Nathan's tortured path through scenes of graphic sex of every possible sort, which although sometimes funny, could not be described, by any stretch of the imagination, as subtle. Be prepared for pierced labias gone septic, ‘enemas’ in return for tooth extraction, orgasms from sharks and sexual arousal through disability.

The narrative has a narrative within it. As Kennedy tells of Nathan's solitary and miserable quest for salvation, Nathan writes his autobiography to use as a vehicle finally to announce his true identity to his daughter. All the right tensions are there and pain oozes from every page—Nathan has cancer, his only friend drinks himself to death, his daughter, Oedipus-like, falls in love with him and at the climax of the book Nathan, in a bid to kill himself, nearly kills his dog instead. But the full impact is lost because of Kennedy's inability to decide what sort of a book she is writing. Is it satire or tragedy? Our hopes are raised for a murder mystery by the death of a child, and for an exposé of the world of literary parasites through Nathan's dissolute and disintegrating literary editor, Jack Dowd Grace. But although all these themes are touched on, none is brought to completion.

Kennedy sets her novel on a Welsh island, but in fact the motley selection of literary losers who inhabit it are pure Islington. ‘In writing, as in love, we die to ourselves yet still live. We become immortality and less than nothingness. We make ourselves fit to hear truths. We make ourselves fit to tell them. Our hearts speak,’ intones the leader of their little fellowship, who might himself, like Kennedy, have won the Social Work Today award. This pretentious hot air is presumably supposed to be funny, but in our world of Blairspeak it is difficult to tell.

What is not difficult to tell, however, is that Kennedy has decided to give fellow Scots authors James Kelman and Irvine Welsh a run for their fucking statistics—Kelman is notoriously said to have included the f-word 3,000 times in one short story. Yet whilst Welsh carries obscenities off because his books are unashamedly repulsive and Kelman succeeds through the clarity and sparseness of his prose, the endless repetition of ‘f—’ and ‘c—’ jar in Kennedy's more expansive style. There are already too many words in this novel. Some of the four-letter ones might have been abandoned. It remains a mystery why many modern Scottish authors seem to think their work will be reckoned stuffy, or even English, if they do not litter it with obscenities. Perhaps our new parliament will give them the confidence to abandon this distraction and to realise that the transition from Walter Scott to Irvine Welsh in 200 years is seen by many as a decline rather than an advance for Scottish literature.

This should be a powerful book, as it certainly touches on powerful themes. Moreover, Kennedy, to her great credit, is not frightened of taking some good digs at contemporary neuroses. But for all the strength of its message, that there is hope even for people utterly hopeless, my more pressing concern having finished it was that the description of a woman who masturbates with vegetables before putting them in the soup was not based on anybody who is likely to ask me to dinner.