Review by
TOM ADAIRPERHAPS IT IS PREMATURE, GIVEN that Ali Smith is a writer still in the ascendent, to term her latest collection of stories quintessential, even vintage. At its finest, it lilts and scintillates but at its flatt
est it merely engages.
Poet, short story writer and novelist, Jackie Kay captures Smith's work with: "She jumps from high places and lands on her feet." Which credits Smith's poise. But it's also true that she jumps from high places and lands on clouds.
Her best tales are airy, darting like sprites or pop-up jokes. They are self-enlightened, yet, somehow, they deprecate all hint of self-absorption; they're stratospheric, ambitious as larks.
And while it is true that "A bit of a lark" is not yet the title of one of Smith's tales, its multi-layered resonance might appeal. For Smith exults in the versatility – the allusiveness – of words, in the elasticity of ideas, in word collision and collusion, she likes the joust, the room to negotiate, and her stories tend to unfurl, even to breathe as they open.
Her opening tale in this collection, "True short story", plays with putative definitions of what a short story might actually be. It is one of her finest, wittiest, supplest, perhaps most scampish tales to date, taking its swipe at NHS funding and social injustice, while at the same time, portraying deep qualities of friendship and aspects of love – not least for the story form itself.
In it, the story is viewed as a nymph, and likewise likened in succession to Princess Diana, then to a cage (according to Kafka), and to the flare of a match in the dark (William Carlos Williams).
When it is being a nymph, the story shamelessly sleeps around, flaunting its goods in sundry anthologies, earning a pittance. While being a flare, you can picture it mischievously setting things alight. You catch its whiff, its high explosiveness, its plotted, stealthy subversion.
Not least, like the nymph in the mythical story of Juno and Echo, the finest short stories, according to Smith, may intently reverberate, dwindling, swelling, reasserting themselves in the mind like beating bell-notes, catching the reader on the rebound at last "when the echo of (the story) answers back".
Smith plays with echoes throughout the collection, effecting humour, exerting technique – the ping-pong of dialogue batted wittily, sharply, sarcastically, lovingly, brusquely. No-one else writing does it so stylishly. It's all part of the magic carpet of "I say, you say" – "I said, you said" – "the man said, the woman said". It's a slipstream, it's irresistible, casting its breath across the page, hot and bothersome, often close-up and confidential, and all the time, drawing you in, albeit surreptitiously.
"Writ", for example, in which the middle-aged narrator enjoys a salutary visit from her 14-year-old, gauche self, a "blunt-nosed foal" busy knocking into things. "She makes insolence a thing of beauty". Before you know it, the "I say, she says" business kicks in, and we're off in a puff of quixotic prose, considering Keats, and the meaning of "writ", the compassion (unrecognised) of teachers. Pathos and poignancy coexist here, along with wisdom, tenderness too, but of sentimentality, not a jot.
Yet if the immediacy – the modernity, the sure, (but never cocksure) authorial voice – are what make first grab on the reader's attention, it is, paradoxically, the thoughtfulness, the imaginative intelligence, the solitude, that assert the more lasting hold.
In the stories that flatten so much you can see where they are going ("The child" and "I know something you don't know"), the lives of the humdrum characters seem more distant – for example, the perplexed, mistaken "mother" in "The child", caged in an unbelievable Kafka-esque unfolding set in Waitrose. It starts at the "realism" shelf, moves inexorably towards nightmare, finishing up as a jet-black joke and with a horror-epiphany for afters.
It's all in the mind, of course. Exactly the point of so much of what Smith writes. The only thing physical here are the marks of the words on the page. The rest is invented – by her, by the reader – a crazy complicity of minds which, in "The first person", the book's final story, is made explicit as the narrator tells the object of affection/derision/banter: "I'm imagining you. I'm making all this up." To which the reply comes: "But what if it's me who's imagining you?" Which slit a smile across my face from ear to ear.
Delicious stuff.
The full article contains 769 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
