There’s something satisfying about reading certain books in the appropriate season. For me, fall means Bloomability; spring is time for The Language of Flowers. In summer, I read a little bit of everything, but there’s certainly something to be said for those quick, funny “beach reads.” And in winter? Oh, man. Winter is prime time for long, languorous sentences. I’ve promised a friend of mine for years that I’ll read the Russians (Anna Karenina is currently on my bedside table raising a skeptical eyebrow), but it’s also time for Dickens and Hugo and all of those delightfully navel-gazy 19th century novelists who refused to edit out page-long descriptions of snow or the battle of Waterloo.
And then, there’s Ali Smith.
I read the first book in Smith’s seasonal quartet this autumn (aptly), and while I was (and, let’s be honest, still am) in the midst of my love affair with her, I opted to wait until the first snow of the season to start Winter. This isn’t necessary, but it also isn’t a problem: the quartet does not follow the same characters throughout, rather meditating on the wholly odd year that was 2016-2017: Brexit, climate change, and more are themes that radiate through her books, each of which has a hint of magical realism.
Smith is an author who, I am aware as I read, often goes over my head. There are so many layers to what she writes, I feel that I could make it a yearly practice to read her seasonal novels, each time gleaning something new from them. (Oh damn. Now I wish I’d bought them all and been inking the margins from read one. But I digress.) I found Winter less enjoyable from a plot perspective than Autumn, but I’m always a sucker for a manic pixie dream girl and fraught families, and Smith delivers on both counts. More than that, Winter affords a ticking time bomb at once urgent and languorous: Trump’s arrival on the world political stage and the reverberations throughout the world, particularly in a post-Brexit-vote Britain.
I do not like spring, but for once, I’m looking forward to it, this year.