I remember, when I was first beginning my journey as a writer of fiction, feeling frustrated by the limitations of language: 26 letters; a relatively finite number of words, of sentence structures; two dimensions on the page. While one can use those tools almost endlessly, I felt their constraints viscerally.
Ali Smith apparently has no such qualms.
I first discovered Ali Smith’s work last summer, and ever since, I’ve been patiently awaiting her books at the end of my library’s waiting list. She manages to play with the rules of language I had thought were unbreakable in a way that creates a sort of poetry of the intellect that I find phenomenally addictive.
The Accidental boasts some of the elusive dreaminess of Girl Meets Boy, albeit with a structure far more rooted in reality. It follows the stories of four members of a family on a summer holiday, each of whom is toying with his or her own demons, and the chaos that is instated when a stranger appears. This newcomer, who bears some characteristics of a myriad of tropes – the manic pixie dream girl, the mysterious stranger, the ingenue, the sexual deviant – manages to subvert some while frustratingly leaning in to others. But in each case, Smith seems to remain wholly aware of her puppeteering, spinning her way towards an ending at once inevitable and – at least to this reader – frustratingly devoid of answers to a handful of essential questions.
I am besotted with Smith, but I often feel not quite smart enough to fully appreciate her. While I’m not usually one for rereading, I believe her works might have to be ones I purchase and annotate again and again in an effort to tease out the many strands of her genius.