The Accidental

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Enter the allegorical figure, the Trickster of mythological renown, to F-up (sorry) -- and in the process, freshen up -- the drone of life. Eve’s son from her first marriage, Magnus, is paralyzed by guilt for his part in a prank that led, unintentionally, to the suicide of a fellow student. Like a number of Smith’s novels, it doesn’t know when to end—usually an element of her joyful profligacy—and trundles along into silliness.

But the couple have split up, so Art pays a stranger, Lux, whom he met at a bus stop, to travel with him to Cornwall and impersonate Charlotte. This is a deeply moral book, with a lot to say about the strangeness of human behaviour, which must often be rendered inexplicable. The elements of realism and surrealism, of tradition and experiment, usually so deftly choreographed in Smith’s fiction, rub awkwardly alongside each other here. The Times Literary Supplement wrote that the book is "original, restless, formally and morally challenging.His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? The neatness of the pun, its capacity to make things rhyme, exists at the expense, perhaps, of mess, despair, and sheer human intractability. Also I laughed out loud when Magnus describes the film "Love Actually" as being like watching a really long building society advertisement hahahahaha! Points of view shift here and there, with meltdown riffs that shake the reader up before moving her along. Weaker are Amber's own brief passages, through which Smith appears to be sketching an argument about the power of cinema and photographs on our imaginations in an image-saturated culture.

I have had occasion to mention Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s film Teorema (Theorem) before, as regards its plot, namely the idea of a stranger arriving into a family or group and completely disrupting it. Filled with the bestselling, award-winning author’s trademark wordplay and inventive storytelling, here 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. Husband and stepfather Michael is little more than a cliché – it doesn’t matter that he himself comes to accept himself as a cliché: a professor who serially sleeps with his students. The matriarch, Sophia Cleves, is eccentric and withdrawn, doesn’t seem to want her family with her, and has made no preparation for her visitors. Everything fits together, and “Autumn,” like “Winter,” can be thought of as instant political allegory.Perhaps self-indulgent or perhaps a key to digesting the absurdist twists in the lives of supposedly ordinary people in the narrative. Sophia’s son Art (who has a difficult relationship with his mother) is supposed to bring his girlfriend, Charlotte. She seems conjured out of legend, an imp, a sprite, beautiful and irreverent and frankly, rather mean-spirited and of questionable moral judgment. Magnus’s teenage angst has legitimate foundations; he’s been involved in a prank gone very wrong and is suffering the torments of hellish guilt until an intervention by the character who is the engine of the story. There were huge logic gaps (such as why Amber was allowed to hang about the house, uninvited and unknown to all of them-- hello?

At one point he even decides he’s going to pick the prettiest checkout girl in a supermarket and sleep with her: an hour later he implausibly achieves his ambition in the back of his car while she’s on lunchbreak.or maybe it was a vehicle for the trundling out of a series of literary devices to show how many literary devices there are. The females, especially the young Astrid are compelling and penetratively imagined; the two males, on the other hand, are flat and unconvincing.