Smart writing will keep you reading Ali Smith’s ‘The Accidental’
A rather well-to-do British family is on summer holiday when a barefooted stranger shows up, wheedles her way in to dinner and begins to systematically – through lies and half-truths – strip the family members of their defenses.
Who is this woman? Where did she come from?
In the end, the reader of “The Accidental” doesn’t much care, because Amber (the stranger) is so very good at dismantling the false rock on which the family is built. And this is a family in dire need of the truth. To the last, they seem intent on taking three giant steps back from life.
The husband is a philandering professor. The wife is at a dead end in her writing job. Neither appears to understand – or even recognize – the teen and preteen in the house. The son is in an emotional spiral over his role in a school prank that went badly, and the 12-year-old daughter, whose eye is far too ironic for her years, is content to view the world through her video camera.
Winner of Britain’s Whitbread Novel Award and short-listed for the Man Booker Prize (which in October went to John Banville for “The Sea”), “The Accidental” reads nothing like an accident. It is, instead, a painstaking tour de force about unflinching truth, sprinkled with a witty helping of modern-day references and some laugh-out-loud phrases.
As Amber, the protagonist, introduces herself, she describes her conception on a table in the cafe of a cinema (the “she” is her mother):
“She had fastened her heels behind his back and my father, surprised, had slipped and grunted into her, presenting her with literally millions of possibilities, of which she chose only one.”
After that cheeky start, the book continues slowly. Or, rather, it skips to Astrid Smart, the girl with the camera. And while Astrid, in true adolescent form, bemoans everything from her substandard holiday to her substandard alarm clock, hang on. Stay with it, even though there are moments when you might want to set this book aside, so great is the girl’s self-absorption.
The next chapter follows the recent history of Astrid’s brother, Magnus. When the weight of his act – the prank gone bad – is finally revealed, the reader is left nearly breathless, but Smith tells the story in circles, each time forcing Magnus closer and closer to what really happened.
That leaves the adults – Michael and Elizabeth Smart – and here Smith hits her stride. Michael Smart, a philanderer, is a master at self-delusion and equivocation. He is churlish, and Smith – and Amber, the wandering righter of wrongs – show him no mercy. There is a series of pages dedicated to the inner workings of Michael that make you want to crawl through the pages and smack him.
Astrid wants to keep the world at bay through the lens of her camera; Michael wants to rise above it with his education and wit. Neither is successful.
For Elizabeth Smart, there is the awakening that she is redundant and sleepwalking through her middle age, and it isn’t until she throws Amber out of the house that you begin to see the awakening of the entire family.
This book works so well because of whip-smart writing, characters who are fully drawn and Smith’s unblinking eye for moving those characters toward the light.