The Accidental

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Why does Smith choose to end the novel with Eve’s journey to America? What is likely to happen in the future to the Smart family? About this Author Not all of the changes are good. Indeed, Amber certainly does things that help the family but others are positively harmful. In some cases, we are left wondering whether good will come out of the changes or whether the individual is set on a course that may or may not be positive. Ali Smith is too good a writer to make simplistic judgements, even if we might do so. 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. An outstanding novel . . . Exuberantly inventive . . . Beautifully formed and astringently intelligent . . . It is as good as anyone who has been watching the progress of this talented author could possibly have hoped." - The Sunday Times.

a b Schaub, Michael (8 January 2006). "Surprise visit upends a family's vacation". San Francisco Chronicle . Retrieved 18 April 2008.The only problem with the brilliance of Astrid as a fictional creation is that it rather makes you wish that the whole novel was hers. Which is not to say that the other characters are exactly bland, only that they don't radiate the same sense of discovery. I can understand why The Accidental is getting a lot of noise. Its a very "writerly" book and very good in that sense. It's written in a stream of consciousness type style, with every chapter representing the internal thoughts of one of the four main characters - Astrid, Magnus, Eve or Michael. Eve is a writer, Astrid and Magnus are her children, and Michael her husband/their stepfather. Smith is especially good at writing the teenagers - it seems that she has absolutely captured the exploration and angst that adolescents go through. The parents are less interesting, because they seem more cliched. Michael is a professor who sleeps with all his students, Eve a writer who is unhappy with her childhood. Both are characters we have seen before (seriously, literary fiction would lead you to believe that every professor sleeps with his student, which really was not the case at either of the institutes of higher learning in which I attended). The children's voice was more fresh to me, and thus their chapters more interesting. 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. Michael is a university lecturer in English literature and has regular affairs with his female students. Eva seems to be aware of this.

The Smart family are dysfunctional. Astrid only views life through her handheld camera, her brother Magnus is suicidal, the half father, lecturer, Michael sleeps with his students and the mother, Eve is a best-selling author who superficial in all ways. Each chapter is about these protagonists and is told through their eyes. The other approach is to believe that it all actually happened, that despite melding truth & fiction for a living; Eve Smart couldn't see through the totally made up surface of Amber/Alhambra's persona & that in the end, Amber used another pseudonym, this time around, she called herself Eve & that the American family was in for a Smart-like misadventure— they were gonna lose all the doorknobs, carpets, & all their pretty horses too!She has an immediate effect, as she gets Magnus to come down for dinner and spend the entire meal with the family. She spends time with Astrid while she films but then, while they are crossing a bridge over a road, throws the camera down into the road.

One thing I found odd was that “outsider character” Amber was an adult – and I think the subsequent implications for her relationship with Michael did not work well, with Michael’s chapters reading like a teenage fantasy. Smith is stronger I think when her outsider is a child – it is perhaps interesting that the Astrid characters are the strongest here. The family is staying in a rented cottage in Norfolk for the summer. Eva is not happy, as she feels the cottage is of a poor standard. Michael is not happy, not just because he has to commute to London for his job (and for his sex), but also because people just do not go to Norfolk any more, they go to Suffolk. Astrid is not happy, as there is nothing to do in the village. This story doesn't really (well, I think) do anything subversive with its subject matter, and maybe that's one way in which it actually is subversive, because you don't exactly expect Smith to let the plot run its course in the usual way. There's playful wit, language-bending and experimentation with form, and at least one Chekhov's gun that doesn't go off, but I was disappointed that the story was neither as disruptive as I wanted it to be nor as conclusive as I, then, hoped it would be. I read this book partly due my love of Ali Smith (based largely around her Seasonal Quartet) but also due to its setting in Norfolk (for interest the culmination of the Seasonal Quartet is also set in Norfolk – Smith herself living nearby in Cambridge, my University town, which also features in this novel). Still, Amber is only a catalyst: the mess that is the Smart family is, for the most part, their own doing.

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Why has Smith chosen Smart as the name of the family in the novel? In what ways are they smart and not so smart?

It's difficult for any writer to pull off rotating viewpoints, but Smith does it perfectly, without a hint of clumsiness or tentativeness. (...) It's especially hard considering how disparate the characters are. (...) It pays to be suspicious of writers who tie things up too neatly, who end novels a little too perfectly. But Smith doesn't have this problem -- the last sentence of the book manages to be enlightening, confusing and almost destructive in its simple power. It doesn't tie things up; it almost unravels whatever ties the reader has invented while reading the book." - Michael Schaub, San Francisco Chronicle a b Caldwel, Gail (22 January 2006). "Perfect stranger". The Boston Globe . Retrieved 30 March 2008. Anyway, whatever, they made the story seem too contrived and dull. None of the characters were engaging nor did they warrant any sympathy, empathy or any other kind of pathy. A prime example being Dr Michael Smart, all round nauseating self obsessed academic with a penchant for thinking and talking about himself in the third person and for bedding his students. Note - the two activities need not be mutually exclusive for the tedious Dr Smart. That said, I can vouch that he is a good representative mash-up of many male academics that I have known and not loved. Thing is, I got most of her books & would like to completionize them but I don't want more of the same. Ali Smith is a gay writer & no problem with that but it gets on my nerves the way her straight female characters respond to overtures from another female— as if a world of (better) unexplored possibilities opens up before them! As if being gay was a lifestyle choice & not an embedded fact of one's biological makeup.

The Accidental

Ratcliffe, Sophie (20 May 2005). "Life in sonnet form". The Times Literary Supplement . Retrieved 18 April 2008. How does Smith capture the angst of early adolescence so vividly in the character of Astrid? What kind of girl is she? What are her most engaging eccentricities? Why does she feel so casually hostile toward the rest of her family? Why is she so captivated by Amber? Into this atomised family one day walks Amber, a thirtysomething blonde wastrel with no love of social niceties. She turns up on the doorstep claiming her car has broken down. Michael assumes she has come to interview Eve, while Eve assumes she is one of Michael's student mistresses; somehow Amber ends up staying with them in the rented cottage for several weeks. Everyone falls in love with Amber in a different way. But who is she, and what does she want? The Accidental takes a well-worn premise – in which the appearance of an enigmatic newcomer upsets the balance of a largely dissatisfied upper-middle-class family – and filters it through that inimitable freeform Ali Smith style. In describing her Genuine Articles, Eve Smart claims that “fiction has the unique power of revealing something true” [p. 82]. How is it that fiction can often deliver deeper truths than nonfiction? What truths does The Accidental reveal?