Ali Smith takes risks in her latest collection of tales, but they all have a charming ingenuity at the core, writes Stuart Kelly
Hamish Hamilton, £16.99
EXPERIMENTALISM means quite different things in the fields of science and art. If the Large Hadron Collider fails to detect the Higgs Boson, the result is perhaps even more interesting for physicists than if it did. If, on the other hand, a piece of
experimental writing fails, all the reader is left with is a heap of unreadable verbiage.
Part of the joy of reading Ali Smith's short stories is in seeing how her particular brand of experimental literature constantly challenges, subverts and reinvigorates the short story form; but always with a core of emotional significance and an undeniably beguiling charm. In The First Person And Other Stories – as with her previous collections, Other Stories And Other Stories and The Whole Story And Other Stories – she gleefully turns the short story inside-out, breaks it into its atoms and rebuilds, stretches and skewers it into whole new topologies.
The opening piece, 'True Short Story', shows her customary virtuosity while suggesting some of the new themes in this collection. In a café, the narrator overhears two men discussing the difference between novels and short stories. The slightly callow, slightly eager younger man maintains that while the novel is a "flabby old whore", the short story is a "slim nymph". This observation prompts the narrator – revealed as Ali – to phone an academic friend, Kasia (a dedicatee of the volume), to ask the joke-like question, "Why is a short story like a nymph?" There are freewheeling answers, taking the reader through classical mythology, Princess Diana, fly-fishing, David Niven and literary theory. It also involves discussing Kasia's fight to get the anti-cancer drug Herceptin, and Ali's almost magic realist "lost voice" at Cambridge, before Kasia's friendship.
There is a danger with Smith's kind of self-conscious, self-reflexive stories that they become all riff and no tune. Although there are 'straight' stories in this collection – an exceptional child narrator in 'The History Of History' and an ingenious and moving piece, 'Writ', where the narrator meets her 14-year-old self – even the most whimsical works have a political edge and a humane empathy that raise them above being mere jeux d'esprit.
Indeed, there's a note of outrage throughout this collection – glimpses of off-duty troops, the older Ali's advice to her younger self: "Don't, by the way, vote Labour in 1997" – that seems new. She can do sparkling; she can also do cutting. One hilarious story, 'The Child', concerns a woman finding an abandoned toddler in a supermarket. The angelic-looking child, it transpires, gives vent to the most ghastly misogynistic, racist opinions. The story evokes pity as much as distaste.
All these stories, at some level, are about storytelling. But that doesn't implode into sterile 'writer writing about writing' territory, since Smith is acute enough to stress that our memories are one form of story; our hopes and aspirations for the future another. She is technically on top form: one story is a kind of literary mash-up, where the plot of Fidelio and the plot of Porgy And Bess collide. A sequence of three stories – 'The Third Person', 'The Second Person' and 'The First Person' – cleverly explore the different nuances of the different voices. 'The Third Person' daringly elides the different stories over the paragraphs; there is no convenient line break to pause the reader. 'The Second Person' becomes antagonistic as a couple describe each other, with exponentially diverging results.
The title (and concluding) story is one of Smith's 'quantum' stories: a tale about all the different possible stories, where, like quicksilver, the minute you think you know where it's going, it'll dart and change instead. A couple decide to "invent a how-we-met story"; part of it reads, "And I said to her, can I give you a hand? And she stopped and said, are you absolutely sure you want to? And I said yes. And I looked down at where my left hand had been and saw there was nothing there." That kind of misdirection and fantasy, guile and innocence, is classic Smith.
In 'Fidelio And Bess', the Ali Smith-esque narrator is told, "You can't just revise things for your own pleasure or whatever." "Actually I can do anything I like," comes the reply, which might as well be a manifesto.
Smith is such a dazzling author that finishing one of her books is always slightly bittersweet; more so here, since it seems to conclude a grand experimental trilogy. Maybe it's time for her to work her magic on the novel.
The full article contains 794 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
