What do you make of a novel which is divided into three sections titled "Beginning," "Middle" and "End"?
Which is told from within the minds of its four major characters with an eerily effective verisimilitude yet maintains an ironic third-person point of view throughout?
Which is ostensibly about middle class English life but is coloured with the awareness of the world-after-9/11 and at war in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Which begins like a modern British novel with a vivid, almost Chaplinesque description of the character's conceptual origins in the café of a cinema theatre during a screening of a Terence Stamp film, but eventually falls to pieces structurally (and willfully) to become a collection of Byronic sonnets?
Ali Smith is best known as a writer of short stories and this book, her "first full-length novel." smells like a collection of linked stories, and almost reads like one.
Almost, but not quite. Because somehow, through dazzling literary virtuosity, Smith manages to pull the whole disparate bag of bits together, and makes it work as a novel.
In fact, it's for her literary virtuosity that you really ride this tramcar through four reality-addled minds, not really for the story. Smith is firmly entrenched in the post-modern world of British literature, where the plot story is less
relevant than how it's narrated and structured, and middle-class British sensibility is just too boring to make up a whole novel without the eyelet-lace of literary texturing.
As for characters, oh, yes, like all short-story writers, Smith loves them to bits, taking them apart and putting them together until they are nothing more than literary inventions--devastatingly conceived and created, thoroughly drenched in real detail and nuance, but literary nonetheless.
Smith knows this quite well.
As does the British literary establishment, which loves her to bits too. Her Hotel World, also a patchwork quilt of linked pieces, was nominated for the Booker, the Orange, and the Queen knows what else. She's also edited the Virago Book of Modern Women's Fiction, is unabashed about her "alternate-sexuality." and usually dedicates her books to her longtime companion Sarah.
But she's staunchly literary, to the point that when co-editing a recent anthology with Toby Litt, she bitched openly about the inferior quality of entries from women writers, raising a brief flurry of controversy.
As you can see from her writing, she doesn't mince words. Which is what makes her a very good writer.
The Accidental is superficially about a "square" British middle class family on holiday whose lives are disrupted by the arrival of a strange woman who interrupts, disrupts, and shakes out their lives like a dusty bedcover.
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