Tolstoy assures us that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but the fractured, secretive Smarts in Ali Smith’s enticing though occasionally frustrating new novel, “The Accidental,” are stubbornly pedestrian in their misery. Their problems – infidelity, fear, regret, guilt, social isolation, inability to let go or make sense of the past – are neither unusual nor surprising and are, in fact, the sorts of troubles that sink most of us sooner or later.
Smith, though, is gifted enough to mold modern nightmares into fascinating and thought-provoking literary treasures. Author of the dazzling novel “Hotel World” – a technical high-wire act in which five women are united by the death of a young chambermaid in a dumbwaiter and, like “The Accidental,” a Man Booker Prize finalist – Smith is also known for several terrific short-story collections reveling in the strange and wonderful, in the peculiar events that reshape reality as we think we know it.
“The Accidental,” recently named Britain’s Whitbread novel of the year, offers Smith’s memorable linguistic gymnastics to a lesser degree. It’s more grounded in reality than her other work, with distinct and affecting voices, searing insight into the savage mechanics of family life, and a powerful dollop of dark humor.
The Smarts are spending their summer break in a quiet country village when into their upscale British lives strolls the mysterious Amber, as glossy, transparent and hard as her namesake. She slumps on the sofa as if she belongs there, offers no explanations for her presence beyond vague references to a car broken down the road. She latches onto these sad Smarts – Eve, mother and blocked writer; her predatory English-professor partner, Michael; her tortured teenage son, Magnus; and surly 12-year-old daughter, Astrid – and without much effort worms into their home and heads.
Michael thinks Amber is Eve’s colleague. Eve thinks she’s one of Michael’s students, one of the young women whose breezy postcards fill his office.
But Amber is no such creature. She disdains Michael’s lechery and entrances the friendless Astrid, who, as protection from her classmates’ cruelty, views her world through the lens of a video camera. She rouses Magnus, devastated by his role in a practical joke that resulted in another student’s suicide, from his fog of pain with the alluring promise of sex. She bewitches all of the Smarts, despite, or perhaps because of, her increasingly bizarre behavior.
Amber is obviously a catalyst for change, an elemental force who prompts the Smarts to re-examine their lives and readjust accordingly.
And that’s one niggling problem with “The Accidental”: She’s no more than a catalyst. She’s an element on which to hang Smith’s exploration of relationships and family in the technological age and the way our perceptions of reality are often at odds with the truth. She’s barely a character, and her fanciful narratives, while entertaining, are less intriguing than the unique and compelling voices of the Smarts.
“The Accidental” is most effective in its depiction of each Smart, each so ironically named, each so hopelessly lost. Eve lies on the floor of the shed all day, pretending to write another in her fatuous fictional/historical Genuine Article series.
Michael, rushing back to London to bed another student and inwardly congratulating himself for his brilliance, is amusingly unself-aware. Wild with lust, he deteriorates until his narrative devolves into sonnets, which are funny, and postmodern typographical trickery, which is not.
Guilty Magnus, numbed into repetition, replays his mistake: “If he hadn’t known so much. If he had just not. If they hadn’t. Then they hadn’t. Then she wouldn’t have. Then she still might.” And Astrid, in whom Smith finds a piercingly true voice, wonders why she felt the need to poke at a dead creature with a stick. Why would I? she asks Magnus. “Why would I want to do something that might be cruel if the animal isn’t dead and is still alive and only looks like it’s dead?” “To see if it’s alive.” That, of course, is Amber’s function: to see if the Smarts are alive. She pokes at them, and they twitch, every one.
Her fortuitous arrival – not accidental, no, for as she says, “everything is meant” – galvanizes them to step toward their uncertain futures.
“The Accidental”
By Ali Smith
Pantheon, 320 pages, $22.95
