The Accidental

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And much of the comedy and the fundamental cheerfulness in Smith’s work has to do, I think, with the figurative consolations the pun embodies: that life is generative, and that, even as things split apart, they can be brought together. Interesting too is the arrangement, the five points of view each of the beginning, middle, and end have some overlap -- and some gaps. He looks up: “A foot and a half above all their heads, floating, precarious, suspended by nothing, a piece of rock or a slab of landscape roughly the size of a small car or a grand piano is hanging there in the air.

Ali Smith learned to read at the age of three from the labels on her elder siblings' singles collection. Critics have noted the ways in which this is a postmodern novel that "raises questions about the nature of representation".

She uses "ie" a lot at first, and then switches to "id est" once someone tells her that it comes from Latin. But, again, the best wordplay here earns its keep by growing new meanings, or new ways of looking at old meanings. Jeff Turrentine of The Washington Post praised the book, writing "though The Accidental is not a conventionally funny novel, readers may find themselves laughing – in surprise and delight – at the way Smith takes a literary trope and riffs on it until she's turned it inside out, the way a great jazz musician might. The matriarch, Sophia Cleves, is eccentric and withdrawn, doesn’t seem to want her family with her, and has made no preparation for her visitors.

But Amber isn't entirely harmless: she's not only completely independent, she has a destructive bent, and doesn't much care what she leaves in her wake. Ali Smith is the author of six works of fiction, including the novel Hotel World, which was short-listed for both the Orange and the Booker prizes in 2001 and won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002. British novelist and Booker Prize nominee Smith (Hotel World, 2001) renders acrobatic prose that seems in a perpetual state of acceleration . A dysfunctional or normal family – pretty much the same thing nowadays – rents a holiday home in Norfolk.Eva is married to Michael and she has two children from a previous marriage to Adam Berenski, Magnus, aged seventeen, and Astrid aged twelve. With her sending up of linear forms, her undermining of beginnings, her use of in-between locations, her interest in wanderers and vagrants and accidental and premature death, her reliance on familiar motifs like stopped watches, Smith seems always to be telling versions of the same story. The Accidental has some marvelous characterizations -- Astrid is the book's crowning glory -- and the writing brims with wit, humor, and energy.

While the others' complicated lives involve so many lies, Amber refreshingly says and does as she pleases.Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents.

Amber, the charismatic, unpredictable, and mysterious visitor, insinuates herself into the household while they are on holiday and changes all their perceptions and lives. Sometimes you finish an Ali Smith book unsure about the final meaning of this variety show but certain that you have been in the presence of an artist who rarely sounds like anyone else. But for this novel to work you have to believe Amber leads the way to discovery in her disciples or victims and for me this only really worked with the pitch perfect Astrid. It follows a middle-class English family who are visited by an uninvited guest, Amber, while they are on holiday in a small village in Norfolk.Magnus is in a horrible limbo of probation pending investigation of his role in internet bullying of a girl that led to her suicide. Words are never stable in Smith’s fiction, because, as in Shakespeare, author and characters are always picking them up and turning them upside down to see what’s going on underneath.