New York Times Book Review Fiction Autumn Ali Smith
Fiction
Spring Cleaning, Ali Smith Style
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Bound
By Ali Smith
"In that location'southward means to survive these times," a graphic symbol says in Ali Smith's new novel, "and I call back one fashion is the shape the telling takes." It's a gorgeous, heartening sentiment, one I happen to believe. I'yard not certain, though, that its author agrees.
Is it possible, in this vertiginous moment, for a novel to be both timely and deep? Timeliness, these days, requires a quick trigger finger; the world of rise fascism and viral falsehoods and ongoing ecology disaster won't hold still long enough to exist written about with more visceral haste. The mercurial politicians who demand our stringent, focused repudiation tend to prompt, instead, human knee-wiggle responses — angry e-mail threads, reactive essays. Inconveniently for the creative person, literary depth requires time, distance, composure. The years of drafting and revision, the months awaiting publication: By the time a book appears, the chat has moved on. (Anyone fancy some literature right now about Trump and Macron's long, strange handshake last May?)
But the Scottish marvel Ali Smith breaks rules improve than anyone. She can build entire narratives around dreams and hallucinations. She can start a new novel in the middle of some other. She can let a single exclamation point stand equally an unabridged paragraph. It wouldn't surprise me if she can write hanging upside down like a bat. And she's given united states of america, with "Jump," the third in a planned quartet named for the seasons, an addition to a work-in-progress both as raw as this morning'due south Twitter rant and as lasting and important equally — and I say this neither lightly nor randomly — "Ulysses."
The travails of Europe and the world were on the horizon when "Autumn" was published in 2017 and banging at the door the following yr in "Winter." But "Bound," set largely in Oct of 2018 (yeah, October as in last fall; yes, of 2018, as in just a few months agone), is the angriest, the most cathartic and despairing, of the three. It's consumed with Brexit and refugee detention and social media and Trump.
Information technology's also a psychological novel about a filmmaker, Richard Lease, who has lost his best friend, an older female person screenwriter. Notably, all 3 books of the quartet then far hinge on male reverence for female person artists — previously real ones, here both real (Tacita Dean) and fictional (Richard's friend Paddy) — an admiration almost as shockingly refreshing on the page as when encountered in real life.
It's also, starting 129 pages in, the more than plot-driven story of Brit, who has lost her soul working in an Immigration Removal Eye, and her impulsive journey to Scotland with a schoolgirl named Florence, who'southward shown upward at the I.R.C. 1 day, effortlessly breached security and shamed the managing director into having the bathrooms cleaned.
We get to run across a lot of the I.R.C. earlier Brit and Florence striking the road, and the portrayal is burdensome. Smith has e'er been precipitous and roughshod, and frequently funny, in her Kafkaesque moments — fruitless passport or loan applications, attempts to unsubscribe from emails — but when she skewers the inner workings of a bureaucracy that detains aviary seekers indefinitely, the tone rises correspondingly to the drastic laughter of gallows sense of humor, the deadpan of the dead at heart. ("This isn't a prison," Brit corrects a Vietnamese refugee who came to United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland sealed in a hauling container, "it's a purpose-built Immigration Removal Eye with a prison blueprint." He and so asks her what it's like to breathe "real air.")
Smith never physically describes the immature Florence, a compelling and infuriating character. We know only that she'south 12 or 13 and alone; according to i of many rumors, her mother, a migrant, has been detained. Otherwise Florence remains a cipher both to Brit and to us, turning her societal invisibility into a kind of superpower. "Certain white people in particular can look right through young people and also blackness and mixed race people like we aren't here," Florence says. It's a slippery sentence, one specifically constructed so that nosotros could understand Florence to be a person of color, or might equally believe that she includes herself in this hypothesis merely because she's a child.
This shouldn't work — what writer gets away with a fundamentally foggy main character? — yet it does. Florence'southward vagueness feels authentic and fundamental, self-protective, non as if Smith is using her every bit a symbol but (wonderfully) as if Florence is using u.s.a..
When Brit, Florence and Richard all terminate up in the same Scottish town, the two stories practice merge in a satisfying way. (Logistically satisfying, that is; in Smith's work, as in Joyce'due south, human being connection, while always the goal, is sometimes redemptive, sometimes ruinous.) Even and then, "Bound" slants more postmodern than its two predecessors. This is largely thank you to interstitial bits framed as the collective vocalization of Twitter trolls, as the voice of social media executives, as a fairy tale. Late in "Spring," Smith offers an excuse for those sections: They've been written in a notebook by the precocious Florence.
Information technology'southward a shift in the novel'due south framing that doesn't quite work, and not only because 12 seems too immature to have written these passages. (1 of Smith's only persistent flaws is in getting the ages of children slightly wrong. In "Winter," a homo doesn't retrieve the existence of an aunt he lived with on and off until he was 5. Perhaps iii, but not 5.) In handing authorship of these gorgeously rageful texts to a graphic symbol, Smith has taken power from the narrator (a narrator with agency and personality, if not corporeality) and from the agglomerative force of the text itself. The overall piece of work is all the same a marvelously manic patchwork, especially when nosotros become a chapter from no character'southward indicate of view on Tacita Dean'south attempt to catch a cloud, or ones on the months of March and Apr — or in the moments when Smith plays fast and loose with the timeline, skipping back and forth like a madwoman with a wonky telescope. And then my objection is minor; but something would accept felt more honest in that fury emerging from the voice of the novel itself.
Or maybe I'one thousand dead wrong. Maybe a 12-yr-old girl wresting control of anger from the commonage consciousness, making it personal, is precisely the point. Perhaps Florence is catching clouds.
One of Smith'south great themes beyond the series is how people are thrust together and how they might live separate lives that miss ane another by inches. The only narrative ties between the three extant books are tenuous human being ones; "Winter" was linked to "Fall" by 1 man, remembered by his sometime lover but not by the son he never knew. "Leap" links back to "Fall" with the late revelation of another severed parental relationship.
Richard Charter's latest film project is about the weeks Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke spent in the same pocket-size Swiss town in 1922 (the year "the world broke in 2," every bit Willa Cather one time asserted), unaware of each other. "Real people," Richard's friend Paddy says, to encourage him, "in the aforementioned place past run a risk, and not knowing, not coming together. … That's bright in itself."
And here is Smith, in another yr of global rending, showing us the fragile possibilities of connectedness. Mansfield and Rilke did sort of meet, we and Richard learn late, but only in writing, and simply in the virtually gossamer way. Richard's new screenwriter, meanwhile, forces the lives luridly together, placing the ii in flagrante delicto in a swinging cable car.
That Smith manages to show things falling apart as well as some small middle holding is to her great credit. At the same fourth dimension, I'm not sure her message is optimistic. Our efforts, information technology seems, to put our religion in man interaction might be equally silly as that screenwriter'southward.
Smith'due south seasonal quartet need not be read in order, but it's increasingly articulate that she is crescendoing — that to feel the books backward would be to read them confronting the manner the earth spins, against the way we, and she, are hurtling toward something horrific.
I doubt Smith herself knows all of what "Summer" volition entail, as it will, past publication, take absorbed the blows of a changing world. But if there'due south a precedent for hope, it's in the ways her characters reach toward one another. If there's a precedent for doom, it'southward in the ways they fail.
In either case, these novels, in straddling immediacy and permanence, the personal besides every bit the scope of a earth tilting toward disaster, are the ones nosotros might well exist looking back on years from now every bit the defining, if inexplainable, literature of an indefinable and inexplainable era.
And the shape the telling takes is, if not salvation, luminescence itself.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/books/review/spring-ali-smith.html
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