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The Accidental, by Ali Smith
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The Accidental is the dizzyingly entertaining, wickedly humorous story of a mysterious stranger whose sudden appearance during a family’s summer holiday transforms four variously unhappy people. Each of the Smarts–parents Eve and Michael, son Magnus, and the youngest, daughter Astrid–encounter Amber in his or her own solipsistic way, but somehow her presence allows them to se their lives (and their life together) in a new light. Smith’s exhilarating facility with language, her narrative freedom, and her chromatic wordplay propel the novel to its startling, wonderfully enigmatic conclusion.Ali Smith’s acclaimed novel won the prestigious Whitbread Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
- Sales Rank: #125758 in eBooks
- Published on: 2007-04-10
- Released on: 2007-04-10
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
Before writing The Accidental, Ali Smith wrote Hotel World, shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize, and several short story collections. Her work is absolutely original, with a trademark quirky style, with whole passages that seem to have been bound into the wrong book and occasional historical asides completely outside the narrative line. Don't be fooled; with Smith, every word has a purpose.
Amber is the catalyst who makes the novel happen. She appears on the doorstep of the Smart's rented summer cottage in Norfolk, England, barefoot and unexpected. Eve Smart, a third-rate author suffering writer's block, believes that she is a friend of her husband's. Michael is a womanizing University professor, but he doesn't usually drag his quarry home. He thinks that she must be a friend of Eve's. Everyone is politely confused and Amber is invited to dinner. She is a consummate liar and manipulator who manages to seduce everyone in the family in some significant way.
Magnus, Eve's 17-year-old son from a former marriage and Astrid, her 12-year-old daughter, are easy prey. Magnus is in despair. He played a prank on a classmate and it went horribly wrong when she killed herself because of the humiliation it caused. He cannot shake the guilt and is about to hang himself from the shower rod when Amber walks into the bathroom, the perfect deus ex machina. She bathes him and takes him back downstairs, announcing that she found him trying to kill himself. Everyone titters. Could it be possible? This is a recurring question as Amber's behavior becomes more and more outrageous. Is this really happening, or is it some family-wide delusion? To add to the mystery, there is a Rashomon-like character to the story in that the same events are recalled by the Smarts through their own filters.
This is a completely engrossing novel that raises as many questions as it answers. --Valerie Ryan
From Publishers Weekly
Heather O'Neill plays Amber, a mysterious stranger who wangles her way into the lives of a vacationing English family spending the summer in a remote cottage. O'Neill reads with studious detachment and a persistent air of mischief, as if the entire story is a particularly juicy practical joke. Given Amber's predilection for wreaking havoc in her new adopted family's comfortably misguided lives, the emotion is supremely apropos. O'Neill is joined by a cast of performers, including Ruth Moore as the perpetually harried, perpetually preoccupied Eve, who spends all her time dreaming of the characters of the latest historical novel she's writing, and Stina Nielsen as Astrid, a 12-year-old with a frightening imagination and a propensity for recording the world on her video camera. The bulk of the book, though, is read by O'Neill, who provides a suitably nuanced reading, at times placid, at times flashing an air of free-floating menace. It is her work, above all, that brings Smith's novel to fully fleshed existence.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The New Yorker
Smith's book, which has just won Britain's Whitbread Novel Award, concerns an attractive stranger who shows up on the doorstep of an unhappy family and is unquestioningly taken in. The visitor, armed with a perfect combination of candor, free-spiritedness, and rough love, proceeds to manipulate each of her hosts. Just as abruptly, and, perhaps, predictably, she disappears. We never learn much about her—her only purpose, it seems, was to jolt the family members out of their respective messes—and her righteous self-assurance can get tiresome. But the novel is saved by its skillful and touching rendering of the mental state of each family member. Smith's well-honed, even obsessive prose gives a feeling of eavesdropping on her characters' innermost thoughts.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Whoops-a-Daisy
By Mark Eremite
It's no secret that writers, especially the literary kind, are known for wearing their works like masks, slipping their hands puppet-like into characters and mugging for their audience: they may not be as smart, attractive, or popular as their characters, but the authors certainly share the same opinions.
In "The Accidental," it's not hard to figure out who author Ali Smith wants to be (or is). She's Amber, a sort of stochastic herbal essence, an earth-flavored, barefoot, dandelion wine of a woman who flounces in a figurative free-fall into the core of the book, twirls about with mad abandon and reckless sexiness, and disappears with just as much speed and consequence. She puts dirty thighs on Heisneberg's uncertainty principle and drops the drawers of chaos theory, manhandling the nuts and bolts inside.
Okay, I'm sorry, I'll be less poetic, even I think Smith herself would appreciate such an out-of-the-lines description. Smith's writing is equally unfettered, and for people who like the idea of meandering through prose the way you might meander through a lovely (and creepy) forest, "The Accidental" is something to cuddle up to. The whole novel reads like one long word game, and even if that means the seriousness of its import is sometimes smeared aside, it also means that for people who love the English language, well, there's plenty here to enjoy.
But that import. Let me not forget the import.
The story is about the family Smarts. Eve is a struggling writer, Michael is an oversexed professor, Magnus is a tortured teen with a secret, and Astrid is a identity-challenged female (one of those thirteen-year-old daughters that cannot accurately be called either girl, woman, or even young lady). Their problems aren't particularly astounding or new, and in many cases, it's hard to sympathize with them, since their troubles are self-brewed and administered (or, in the case of Astrid, normal enough to be boring).
Amber doesn't sympathize with them either. She appears one day at their summer cottage and their lives begin to change. She manipulates and motivates them in the same way any good author drives and directs her characters. The only difference here is that the characters are aware of the manipulation. Step aside, Priandello. Smith's gonna show you a thing or two.
It works in fits and starts (much in the same way that the metaphorical character names are simultaneously profound and heavy-handed), depending on who you sympathize with. I found myself most closely drawn to the adolescent Astrid, but only because her pre-teen angsts were so accurately set up and then so cleanly knocked down. Magnus's shackles of misery and his subsequent liberation I found clever but overdrawn. Eve's self-doubts and dramatics were powerfully done, but ultimately watered down. And Michael, well, the man may well have not existed in the book. As an English professor, some of his sections manage to have the most interesting writing and yet still say the least out of anyone's. Perhaps that's the point.
The book shows us the same things in four different ways, and it's entertaining in the way of jugglers and Rubik's Cubes. It's ultimately the point of the novel that gets in the way, its drive to be something serious. Eve's section ends with a sort-of back-loop to what started the novel, and it's far too cute for the book's own good. She tries to learn and emulate Amber, the novel's catalyst, and although Smith suggests it leads to redemption, I have my doubts.
Because, although Amber is certainly an intriguing character, she is ultimately a marionette with about four strings too many. The book is occasionally punctuated with brief Amber vignettes; related primarily to movies, they are supposed to give us a glimpse into Amber's genesis and upbringing in a world of celluloid and Act 3 miracles, to show us where her free-spirited anarchy found its first birth, and to explain -- in some small measure -- why (or how) this strange woman alters the lives along her seemingly uncharted path. It's Smith's way of bear-hugging the character, of petting her fondly by the fire of her soul.
It's a little patronizing, but it's also understandable. Amber is any author's dream -- something mysterious and sexy, a controlled explosion. Smith wants to use her to teach us something, and even if I didn't feel particularly educated after her exposure (can you guess if the Smarts get smarter?), I did enjoy myself. That part probably wasn't an accident.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Great virtuosity, small flaws
By wbjonesjr1
I come down on the side of those who see great things in this book. Yes there are some weaknesses: eg. I'm sure Smith could have found more effective and direct ways to make anti-Iraq War statements, and I agree with those that find the poems in the middle gimmicky. In my opinion, Smith creates four great characters and four captivating and emotionally powerful motifs whereby "Amber" shakes each one of them up. Each situation individually and collectively build up considerable tension. And I thought the prose was quite beautiful. All in all, I think what made me admire this book is that I found literary virtuosity where others found pretension. I will look forward to Smith's future books and will not be surprised if one turns out a classic
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Nothing accidental about it, except maybe Amber
By H. Thompson
A family on holiday in a rural county northeast of London is so self-absorbed that they don't realize that they've let a complete stranger into their home. This is the premise of Ali Smith's 2005 novel, The Accidental. The first chapter begins in the first person voice of Amber MacDonald, the stranger; she is the only first person voice in the story. Each of the three sections of the book allows the voice of Amber and each of the four people in the family a stream-of-consciousness narration of their thoughts during a stretch of time. The family: Astrid Smart, the twelve year-old daughter who strives to record all of her life on a camcorder; Magnus Smart, the seventeen year-old son haunted by the suicide of a classmate; Eve Smart, the mother and egotistical author of bad fiction; and Dr. Michael Smart, the step-father and philandering professor; relate their lives in a polyglossic net of third person, present tense episodes. The book moves through time completely within the thoughts of these characters; a modern use of language and structure elements creates a striking, vivid picture of each of their personal crises.
At first look, the characters seem flat, almost stock characters, floating around, too self-centered to notice each other. Astrid's prepubescent musings are whimsical but hardly philosophical; Magnus's depressive, obsessive repetitions are tiresome. Enter Amber. Almost immediately, she saves Magnus from bathroom suicide, becomes the singular obsession of Michael, and gains the trust of Astrid. Amber is the center of conflict in the novel, and the catalyst for the change of each of the family members. While she drives the conflict, however, it would be difficult to say that she is the book's main character--each of the characters brings their own unraveling story to the book, and amazingly, Smith does justice to each of them. Michael, the cliché of the philandering professor, even seems to become self-aware--losing his egoism in the realization that his life is a stereotype. In the only break from stream-of-consciousness style writing in the text, this realization is related in sonnet, free verse, aabb and abab poetry form in the words of Michael.
Because the narration is almost exclusively the stream-of-consciousness presentation of the thoughts of each individual character, the narration does little for exposition beyond what is apparent to the characters. When the characters return home from their vacation at the end of the novel, their house has been stripped entirely empty of everything except the answering machine. It is never discovered what actually transpired to cause this, but Eve suspects that it is Amber's doing. This and other intentional ambiguities add to the mystery of the novel. As epiphanies are reached and characters change their perspectives, the reader must choose which perspective to take on the turn of events, based on the different realities of each of the characters.
One of my favorite elements of the text is the relation of current events to the lives of the characters. At one point, toward the end of the book, Eve is reflecting on some disturbing images recently released from Abu Gharib prison in Baghdad. The picture is a familiar one to the minds of most contemporary Americans, and the description of her reflection on the pictures is probably similar to a fairly recent experience many readers have had. It remains to be told whether this will simply make the book seem outdated in later years, but having snippets of what is still a current situation throughout the text creates a solid sense of a modern setting.
Conventions of devices and structure exist to promote unity and harmony in a text. The Accidental lacks the conventions of dialogue, capitalization, sentence structure, character structure (antagonist vs. protagonist), exposition, punctuation, and use of a single narrator. All these things aside, however, the book still exists as a unified text. The ending of the book is (without being a spoiler) very satisfactory, the text seems harmonized and even one further--believable. There is very little extraneous material, sans one piece: the first person musings of Amber. Amber seems to ramble about little connected with the action of the novel, and her first person narration is completely false. Amber claims to be everything she isn't, and gives absolutely no insight into her character. This is not to say that the book would be any better if the reader knew what Amber was thinking; in fact, it would definitely detract from the intended ambiguity and mystery of the text. However, her parts were rambling, nonsensical, and the author might have done us one better by simply leaving them out. Fortunately, Amber's input is short and the development of the other characters makes up for her extraneous babble.
The unconventional style of Smith's novel is quite successful in telling the story of a pivotal year in the life of the Smart family. The modern structure creates ease of understanding of the characters and their surroundings, and allows the author, in a relatively short text, to relate not one, but four complete stories.
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