The Accidental

Product Information

While the others' complicated lives involve so many lies, Amber refreshingly says and does as she pleases. Even better is the way that Astrid changes. Many child narrators are artificially fixed in an idealistic moment to teach us something about youth and innocence. Though the action of The Accidental spans only a few months, Smith manages to render a sense of learning and linguistic faddishness in the girl. When the novel begins, Astrid's favourite word is "substandard", but by the end it is in the process of being replaced by "preternaturally". She uses "ie" a lot at first, and then switches to "id est" once someone tells her that it comes from Latin. Winner of the Whitbread Award for best novel and a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, The Accidental is the virtuoso new novel by the singularly gifted Ali Smith. Jonathan Safran Foer has called her writing “thrilling.” Jeanette Winterson has praised her for her “style, ideas, and punch.” Here, in a novel at once profound, playful, and exhilaratingly inventive, she transfixes us with a portrait of a family unraveled by a mysterious visitor. Here it is, Ali Smith’s first full-length novel, and it is as good as anyone who has been watching the progress of this talented author could possibly have hoped. (...) Smith’s version of this archetypal fable is less mystical than Pasolini’s, but funnier. (...) Smith has written a proper novel with a beginning, a middle and an end, but turned it into an exuberantly inventive series of variations. At her beginning, each character is facing some kind of dead end. By the end, everything, including the story of the stranger on the doorstep, is ready to begin again. And in the middle is a fable as beautifully formed and as astringently intelligent as her barefoot delinquent angel." - Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times Among much amusing word-play throughout the novel are the reactions to Amber's straight-faced truths, as when she leads Magnus down to dinner: "I found him in the bathroom trying to hang himself, she said. Everybody round the table laughed.").

The story is of a dysfunctional London family in summer residence in a rural town in Norfolk, with sections alternately told from the minds of an adult couple, Michael and Eve, and their kids, twelve-year old Astrid and seventeen-year old Magnus. Astrid is largely ignored by her parents and lives in a vibrant fantasy life and projects involving documenting the world with her videocam. Magnus is in a horrible limbo of probation pending investigation of his role in internet bullying of a girl that led to her suicide. Eve is enjoying success as a writer of a series based on ordinary real people who died in World War 2, whom she renders in a fictional rewrite of the life they might had lived. Michael is a professor of Victorian literature, failed poet, and perpetual philanderer targeting his students. A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. I feel like there was an age, or it IS that age, where writers love to explore with much keenness the family unit, for it is the perfect structure with which to scrutinize its individual parts ("The Corrections," "White Teeth," "The Red House," the list is almost infinite). & this one, a more accessible and modern "Sound and Fury" is a doozy. Like, what is happening here? is the main question through this dense but very readable firework of a novel. All 4, or five, protagonists are given a very democratic framework in which to display their various personalities. We trace their singular trajectories, their personalities bleed unto each vignette like a soul to some artifact--authentic life stories, these.The family goes on a short vacation, renting a holiday house. One evening Amber, a woman aged 30 and not related to the family, walks into the rental house and makes herself comfortable. Michel thinks Amber is Eve’s guest, Eve thinks Amber is one of Michael’s conquests. Amber has an affect on all four members of the household. An engaging, worthwhile read. If there is a heroine, it is Astrid. She has a new video camera and gets up early every morning to film the dawn. She also films other things, such as the vandalised Indian restaurant and the cleaning lady. She has also been subjected to bullying at school and her mobile phone has been stolen by older girls. She dare not tell her parents, even though they are still paying for the contract.

After Amber's bold performance, the conciliatory conclusion (...) disappoints. Yet Ms. Smith's formal achievements make her required reading for serious student's of last year's fiction. (...) Her stream of consciousness is narrow, but it is swift and deep." - Benjamin Lytal, The New York SunBut 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." - The New Yorker Winner of the Whitbread Award for best novel and a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, The Accidental is the virtuoso new novel by the singularly gifted Ali Smith. This is a book for folks who have an appetite for literary experimentation. If you liked Ulysses, you will like this. If you like guessing where dialogue begins and thought ends, you will love this. As for me, I think that punctuation was invented for a reason. Call me pedestrian. I also like some literary experimentation, for example I loved Shadow Tag by Louise Erdich. But Erdich’s book drew me in inexorably and I watched in horror as a relationship imploded. It was a compelling and satisfying work and well worth putting the time into. This one was simply boring and annoying and it alienated me. It's a revealing detail that the daughter Astrid's first impressions of Amber are the truthful ones, later you see different family members seeing her as "angelic," "beautiful," & so on.