This was a fun and surprising read with lots of scintillating wonders in its delivery and content. It falls into the box of “experimental writing”, but it flows along so fast and spritely compared to many a turgid, self-important postmodern of doorstop dimensions. Ali’s opening epigraph from John Berger was a perfect set-up: “Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to tat life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.”The story is of a dysfunctional London family in summer residence in a rural town in Norfolk, with sections alternately told from the minds of an adult couple, Michael and Eve, and their kids, twelve-year old Astrid and seventeen-year old Magnus. Astrid is largely ignored by her parents and lives in a vibrant fantasy life and projects involving documenting the world with her videocam. Magnus is in a horrible limbo of probation pending investigation of his role in internet bullying of a girl that led to her suicide. Eve is enjoying success as a writer of a series based on ordinary real people who died in World War 2, whom she renders in a fictional rewrite of the life they might had lived. Michael is a professor of Victorian literature, failed poet, and perpetual philanderer targeting his students. Into their lives comes a stranger, Amber, a 30-something woman appears at their home unannounced:Sorry I’m late. I’m Amber. Car broke down.Eve assumes she is one of Michael’s student conquests, and Michael assumes she is one of his wife’s feminist acolytes. Astrid thrives on the attention she pays her, and Magnus finds solace in her ready grasp of the hell of remorse he is in. Michael is inspired by her ignoring him and smitten into lust and love by her apparent innocence and goodness. Eve is gratified by her taming effects on her kids and challenged to prove her integrity in the face of being told privately by Amber that she is an expert fake. Is Amber a midwife for healthy development of each character or a malevolent, lying manipulator? These questions get more insistent when she destroys Astrid’s camera and encourages Magnus’ adolescent lusts. The changes in Michael and Eve evolve down strange pathways, a great satire for me who appreciates a humbling of academics prone to getting divorced from the realities of ordinary life.Interspersed with the episodes on the family are segments told by someone who calls herself Alhambra, named after the movie theater where she was conceived. Her riffs on cinema history and the impact on our culture are marvelous. It seems likely this is Amber, based on what she says she gained from her parents: “ From my mother: grace under pressure; the uses of mystery; how to get what I want. From my father: how to disappear, how not to exist.”One three-page mash-up of movie plots at the middle of the book is worth treasuring. Perhaps self-indulgent or perhaps a key to digesting the absurdist twists in the lives of supposedly ordinary people in the narrative. Try a sample and see if it doesn’t whet you for the whole piece: But my father was Alphie, my mother was Isadora. I was unnaturally psychic in my teens, I made a boy fall off his bike and I burned down a whole school. My mother was crazy; she was in love with God. There I was on the alter about to marry someone else when my boyfriend hammered on the church glass at the back and we eloped together on a bus. My mother was furious. She’d slept with him too. The devil got me pregnant and a satanic sect made me go through with it. Then I fell in with some outlaws and did me some talking to the sun. I said I didn’t like the way he got things done. I had sex in the back of the old closing cinema. I used butter in Paris. I had a farm in Africa. I took off my clothes in the window of an apartment building and distracted the two police inspectors from watching for the madman on the roof who was trying to shoot the priest. I fell for an Italian. It was his moves on the dancefloor that did it. I knew what love meant. It meant never having to say you’re sorry. It meant the man who drove the taxi would kill the presidential candidate, or the pimp. It was soft as an easy chair. It happened so fast. I had my legs bitten off by the shark. I stabbed the kidnapper, but so did everyone else, it wasn’t just me, on the Orient Express.I loved how Astrid’s playful, fertile mind was rendered, an internal version of her mother’s characterization as “Kicky and impatient, blind as a kitten stupefied by all the knowing and not-knowing”. Innocent she may be, but she is the one to put things into perspective toward the end of the book by imaging in detail the apocalypse of an asteroid strike (asteroid she tells us is one letter added to her name). My biggest empathy for the characters goes to him due to Ali’s method of portraying his state of guilt over his classmate’s suicide and the cold arithmetic behind school’s eventual decision to cover it up:Everyone is broken. …The people talking on all the millions of tvs in the world are all broken, though they seem whole enough. The tyrants are as broken as the people they broke. The people being shot or bombed or burned are broken. The people doing the shooting or the bombing or the burning are equally broken.…We are glad to inform you. The matter officially closed.The end result=they’ve got away with it.The end result=no one really wants to know.…He can forget it. A simple act of subtraction. Him minus it. He can have his memory erased by a special laser pen-torch, like in Men in Black.I chock this one up as a bedazzling and wonderful read and recommend it to those who like quirky tales with an underground impact that can catch you unaware. As it is 10 years old, I will eagerly pursue other books from her imaginative mind.
Ali Smith is obviously a genius, a savant, a being whose prolific intelligence is a gift not merely to readers, but to humanity. Or at least, her editors seem to think so. (Why not tell a wondrously gifted writer when she’s written too much? When the clever has become the clumsy, the prodigy pedantic?)This ambitious novel begins by promising to examine one of the most fascinating subjects available to novels and those who love them: the interplay between “real life” and story. Such examination is executed in the form of a plot (action, characters, scenes) and a subplot (constant collages of quotes, bits of poetry, scenes out of books, plays, and possibly every film ever shot in English, from the silent era to Men in Black). The device is not without precedent, though it has rarely been asked to work so hard or so noisily. Where many writers interested in life-as-story will examine the issue through one insightful character—-Hamlet comes to mind—-and a few key scenes in which he addresses the topic as Hamlet does so famously, Smith gives us a story with no less than five characters, each a genius of one sort or another, and at least four of whom are plagued by minds that never, ever stop editing, analyzing, counting and quantifying, obsessively comparing their lives to stories, poems, mathematical theorems and scientific propositions of all kinds. This is not merely a stream of consciousness. It is, as the book’s Astrid Smart (age 13) might phrase it, the Amazon River of consciousness, the Mississippi-Nile-Congo-Ganges-Danube-Euphrates-Hudson-Rhine-Thames-Yangtze-Zambezi-(and so on for two or three pages), a disconnected flow of tangent upon tangent and layer upon layer, until you are drowning in the metaphorical, wondering what happened to the action in the “real world” of the story. Yet, for all that, this novel about the interplay of real-life and story delivers more flash than substance. I read it as chapter upon chapter of clever wordplay and sleight of hand, but no answers to admittedly good questions about life-as-story-as-life. Smith gives the reader what her character Eve Smart gives interviewers at a book signing, which she attends intent on answering every question with a question, "so she might appear open, while actually remaining rhetorically closed." In the end, to the questions of what role story plays in real life, Smith provides only more questions. Good questions, but questions only. As another character might put it, the “end result = nothing. No new insight.” To be fair, Smith spins a good yarn, when she is not being overtly clever and overdosing on figurative possibilities and potential layers of meaning. It's good work: decent action and characters. And she asks good questions, as I said. Considering that art versus reality has fascinated philosophers and artists and literary critics at least since Aristotle, Smith can hardly be expected to somehow answer all the questions that might be asked on the subject. Moreover, this is a skeptical age. Aristotle and Plato are entirely unwelcome in fiction. Questions are permitted, but Moderns will hardly tolerate anything posing as answers. Still, “in the end,” the book promises more than it delivers.Personally, I owe the author a debt. Because should I ever write another novel (or revise the over-built doorstop collecting dust in my laptop), I now have a new mission: no matter how smart I might be, I will not reveal it in fiction. Because reading The Accidental has convinced me that if a novel has me speculating about the impressive IQ or education of the writer, then the book’s own content has distracted me from the story itself. I want readers to be engaged. I want to be engaged. It’s not about the writer. And that’s not to say it was Smith’s intent, conscious or otherwise. But I found the constant, even ubiquitous demonstration of her wit and of her breadth and depth of knowledge on numerous subjects distracting. It felt self-consciously smart. Witty, sure. And clever. But too much wit and too much cleverness. How ironic, “typical and ironic,” that the main characters are united by the surname “Smart.” Of course they are. But the smartest one of all is the Puppeteer holding the strings. I found myself looking too closely at not only the strings, but the Puppet Master, whose gloves and sleeves and wry smiles at her own jokes were just a little too visible behind and above it all, like the Wizard of Oz, trying to keep the illusion afloat.Nevertheless, I like Smith. I like her themes, her curiosity, and her interest in subjects that interest me. I like her characters and her insight on so many subjects. She does ask good questions. This review may be much ado about little. But I found that little to be distracting throughout the whole. If the pages and pages of four highly caffeinated and obsessively reflective streams of consciousness where cut by 40 percent, this would be a better book.
What do You think about The Accidental (2007)?
Somehow I managed to become trapped inside a world of streaming consciousness, present tense narrative that jumped from inelegant metaphor to inelegant metaphor. I barely made it out alive, swallowing almost fifty pages before declaring defeat and making a strategic retreat to the next book on my to-read shelf.Thank goodness I got out in time!Ali Smith's writing style in this book is too jarring for me to get into the story and actually enjoy it. Reading this book took more effort than The Name of the Rose for significantly less return, and after nearly fifty pages, the story didn't seem to be going anywhere--which is actually an accomplishment, since at first glance there appears to be no story whatsoever.Rather than adhering to established literary conventions, such as quotation marks to mark up dialogue, Smith has decided instead that everything should be presented in a stream of consciousness narrative in which Capital Letters make a frequent cameo and the word "substandard" reappears in awkward places. Now, I'm all for experimenting with the medium, as long as such experiments don't detract from the telling of the story itself, which is the case here. The thing about quotation marks is that they aren't just a stylistic innovation; they're actually functional devices. And I miss them.I should have been suspicious from the cant of the reviews on the back: "Ali Smith is a true original", according to Joyce Carol Oates. Just how original I found out after the prologue.... Then "I love Ali Smith's work"--Jeanette Winterson, The Times. Well that's certainly ... informative--if only about Winterson's reading habits and not Smith's actual talent. Maggie O'Farrell is correct when she says that Smith is "a writer of incredible inventiveness, versatility and uniqueness", but I don't think I would agree with the intent behind that utterance. Lastly, the Independent must have been sent the wrong book by mistake, for it declared Smith "an extremely readable, easy-flowing writer and one of the subtlest and most intelligent around."I wish that I could criticize the actual book itself more, but I put it down so early into the novel that it's hard to do so. I wish I could have finished it--I very seldom give up on a book, trying instead to keep an open mind and soldier on no matter how difficult it becomes. And that's the thing: there is a very fine line, more a one-dimensional edge, that separates genius voice from literary trainwreck. Douglas Coupland and Paul Quarrington have genius voice; Ali Smith has unfortunately landed on the trainwreck side of this divide--at least in my opinion.
—Ben Babcock
This novel was shortlisted in the 2005 Booker. This and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go lost to John Banville's The Sea. I can't believe it!Compared to "The Sea", this book's storytelling is very innovative. Brilliantly fresh. My first Ali Smith and I thought I was reading the 21st century equivalent of my favorite James Joyce. The first half is alienating because it basically uses stream-of-consciousness with the main characters having their own POVs per chapter and Smith used terms and events that are basically known probably to people in England except when she used contemporary world-known lines from movies, e.g., "Love Actually" or songs, e.g., Streisand's "Love, soft as an easy chair". Then I saw myself singing while trying to figure out what was the book was trying to tell me. But I love it for its newness. I mean, Smith went everywhere with her narration especially in the first part, The Beginning. Then the plot started to take shape in the second part, The Middle before she finally tied all the loose ends and made herself clear in the last part called The End. On the criticism that the girl Amber's role seemed not to make sense, I think her role was just to let the family members realize their true selves. The Smart family, composed of Michael, the father, Eve the mother, Magnus, the son and the daughter Astrid, is a typical Western dysfuntional family. In the beginning of the book, the young girl Astrid brings with her, anywhere she goes, a camera and she has this habit of capturing sunrises and sundowns. My take on this is that Astrid tries to filter what she sees through her camera because it is through the lens where she can figure out things better. It's kind of metaphor and I loved it.One day, she finds a beautiful letter that her father wrote to her mother when they were still courting each other. This seems to have made her realize that their family was once a happy one. When the father was not yet having extra-marital affairs with his students, the son hasn't been the cause of his classmate suicide and the mother hasn't lost touch of the reality in her life. The reason why I said this is that towards the end when Astrid kisses her mother, "Eve was moved beyond believe by the kiss." It reminded me that we sometimes all get to busy with our everyday tasks and we forget kissing and hugging our loved ones. This is kind of a cliche but true. My favorite character is of course Astrid. She is now one of the fictional characters that I will remember for a long time or maybe remember forever. Smith was able to beautifully capture the eccentricities and intensity of a 12-y/o lost character.I will be reading more novels by Ali Smith for sure. Same goes for Kazuo Ishiguro: I'm currently reading my 7th novel written by him. But not for John Banville. After I read his "The Sea," I decided not to pick another one by him. This is one of those cases when I don't agree with the Booker jurors.
—K.D. Absolutely
I love Ali Smith. She's so inventive and irreverent. The Accidental sprang from a dream she had, and it's dreamlike. Smith often uses multiple perspectives to weave together a story. I happen to like this--and I find her really gifted at inhabiting different voices. Her other book, Hotel World, really knocked my socks off too. But the Accidental asks different questions (Hotel World was kind of a mystery about a girl who fell down an elevator shaft). Questions like: who are we and how do we end up as who we are and what is the power of fantasy?
—Robin
