The Accidental

Ali Smith's writing is astonishing. She has a knack for quirky humor and engrossing wordplay. In her novel THE ACCIDENTAL, for instance, one of Smith's characters (Amber) describes her childhood: "But my father was Alfie, 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 at the altar 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 a couple of 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" (pp. 104-105). When it was published in 2004, not surprisingly, THE ACCIDENTAL was shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize and won the 2005 Whitbread Novel of the Year award. The novel tells the non-linear story (told through the shifting mental perspectives of each character) of a blonde, free-spirited, thirtysomething woman (Amber), who unexpectedly disrupts the Smart family vacation in Norfolk, England by seducing each family member with her psychological manipulations. If you believe the Smarts, Amber is "a charlatan and a trickster and a liar" (p. 230). Astrid Smart is a 12-year-old who sees the world through the lens of her video camera. To her, Amber is a hero who throws her camera from a highway overpass. Magnus Smart is Astrid's guilt-racked 17-year-old brother, who believes he killed a classmate with a humiliating e-mail. To him, Amber is an angel who not only saves him from his despair, but who also awakens his sexuality. Their mother, Eve Smart, is a writer suffering from writer's block, who believes Amber is her womanizing husband's latest conquest. Michael Smart is a University professor, who assumes Amber is his wife's friend. When Amber just as abruptly disappears from their lives (as the US war in Iraq is escalating), the Smarts have discovered that, while they can take a vacation from the shadows of the world they have been calling life, it takes an "accidental" encounter with Amber to jolt them from that life. Smith suggests the Smarts are like the "group of men" in Plato's cave, who mistake the shadows of the cave for the world, and Amber is like the one who wandered outside the cave to discover the sun

I highly recommend this book to any of you who enjoy reading for the sake of reading. Yes, the plot is interesting; yes, the technique of switching from one character to another and allowing the reader to feel the fullness of that character is wonderful; yes, the voices the author switches between are realistic. But, the whole is so much more than the combined pieces. This is one of those books that provides pleasure while reading and a real sadness and longing for more as the book approaches its end. If you read because you love words and language and those time when you float away on the ideas a book presents to you, read this book. Then, read it again.

Novelist Ali Smith's books (HOTEL WORLD, THE ACCIDENTAL) have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and it is certainly no mystery as to why. Her writing is fresh, her character development is thorough and refreshingly consistent, and her motivation for writing clearly is not to prove a point, to push an overarching authorial voice, or to flaunt her obvious talent, but simply to allow her characters to tell a good story. Winner of the 2005 Whitbread Book Award, THE ACCIDENTAL is such an engrossing and contemplative novel that you'll want to read it a second time in order to pick up what you might have missed the first go-round. Although Smith's stream-of-consciousness writing style takes a bit of getting used to, it is inevitably the glue that holds this fascinating book together. Split into three sections (the beginning, the middle and the end), the story slowly and deftly unfolds as the perspective switches from character to character, narrator to narrator. What we are left with at the novel's conclusion is a patchworked, pieced-together glimpse into a broken down yet blazingly human family before, during and after the strange summer that permanently altered each member and changed their outlook on life (and each other) in mystifying ways. Before "escaping" for a summer to a rented cottage in Norfolk, the Smarts (12-year-old Astrid, 17-year-old Magnus, and parents Eve and Michael) resemble a typical dysfunctional family. Astrid spends her days either walled up inside her imagination or behind a video camera filming other people's "far more interesting" lives. Magnus sequesters himself in his room, refusing to bathe, eat, or speak to his family after a school prank he masterminded results in a classmate's suicide. Michael sleeps with countless of his students at the university and ignores his family, and Eve halfheartedly whittles away at the writing block that is preventing her from beginning her next novel. Collectively, they are a pathetic sight to behold --- incommunicative, worn-out, and apathetic about each other and their future. Enter Amber MacDonald, the barefoot and unshaven thirty-something year-old stranger, who appears one day out-of-the-blue at the cottage and stays long enough to make a few unexpected --- and frightfully lasting --- impressions on each of them. Despite the fact that she isn't directly connected to the family (although each of them assumes she's a friend, lover or colleague of the other), Amber manages to worm her way into the Smarts' day-to-day routine. "Amber is ruthless with Astrid. She is unbelievably rude to Michael. As if I give a monkey's f--- about what you think about books. She is bored silly by his mother, makes no attempt to hide it. Uh-huh. So: Astrid is besotted. Michael looks more determined every time. His mother gets keener to dredge up 'interesting' things to say. It is like a demonstration of magnetic gravity. It is like watching how the solar system works. As concerns Magnus himself, A

There are so many pleasures to be found in this skillfully crafted book. Whether it is the characters' names, their hidden perceptions, the setup, or the interior monologue of the catalyctic Amber, the only story told in first person. Initially, the four "Smarts" are so wrapped up in their individual dramas, that they barely intersect. Many issues of the day are addressed, some of which don't become apparent until after the book has been closed. The reader keeps returning to passages, wondering how this or that was missed the first time around, but realizing that until the entire picture has been presented, it would be impossible to isolate a revelation. To say more would ruin new readers' experience of taking this journey for themselves. It provided more fun than I've had in a long time with a book.

Surprise and chance have a way of intrusively wedging a new perspective into people's lives. The four members of the Smart family seem in particular need of just such an unexpected element during their holiday in the Norfolk countryside. All of them are on the brink of a major crisis in their lives, but most of them are carefully avoiding the reality of their situations. At their idyllic getaway which the daughter Astrid views as an "unhygienic dump" they receive an unexpected visitor who brashly delivers a new point of view. From beginning, middle to end they are shaken into a new understanding of the world. This is an intelligent, carefully structured novel that is both funny and illuminating. A chance trip to watch the movie Love Actually leads Magnus, the confused young son of the family to ruminate on Plato's ideas about Belief and Illusion. Ali Smith is able to incorporate myth and philosophy into her wry look at ordinary modern life in a way that produces an entirely fresh way of seeing. From the minute details of life to the war in Iraq playing in the background, the methods we use to understand things are exposed and questioned. Whether seeing reality through the filter of Astrid's camera lens or the mathematical equations of Magnus, the way we view the world is scrupulously examined. But the characters have a sense that truth is still hidden from them leading them to use new tools to examine it. Ali Smith bravely experiments with language and the form of the novel to re-view life. If her technique is viewed by some as placing literary panache over essential meaning then Smith seems to answer this through her character the novelist Eve who responds, "It's not a gimmick. Every question has an answer." Smith cleverly constructs different paths to bring us to new answers.