The Accidental

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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. The Accidental may claim the record for time spent in my reading queue - I bought it over five years ago, and finally got around to reading it this weekend. When I bought it, it had already generated quite a buzz - nominated (unsuccessfully) for the Booker prize, winning the Whitbread. I wasn't sure what to expect.

Smith was an English lecturer at Strathclyde University before falling ill with chronic fatigue syndrome for a year. She then became a full-time writer. Did you know? Ali Smith is a Scottish author, born in Inverness in 1962. [5] She was a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow until she retired after contracting chronic fatigue syndrome, to concentrate on writing books. [6] Smith's first book, Free Love and Other Stories, was published in 1995 and praised by critics; it was awarded the Saltire First Book of the Year award. [5] Plot [ edit ] Amber is written with a punchy if sometimes preachy directness. Each of the Smarts, on the other hand, engages in some particular variety of interminable introspection. (...) Like an elaborately faceted lens, Smith's writing aims to magnify her story and its characters. Instead, angled as it is, it distends its creator." - Richard Eder, The Los Angeles Times While the others' complicated lives involve so many lies, Amber refreshingly says and does as she pleases. It's an enormous technical accomplishment that reminds us of the difference between linguistic hocus-pocus and real writing; more important, it casts a spell." - Joseph O'Neill, The Atlantic Monthly

Daughter Astrid is on the verge of teen-age, and at the beginning of the summer preoccupied with recording a variety of images on her expensive video camera (dawns -- the ultimate beginnings -- for one).

Smith's work has been the subject of critical acclaim from the publication of her first Saltire award-winning collection of stories, Free Love and Other Stories, in 1995. She has since been shortlisted for the Booker and the Orange prizes for both her second novel, Hotel World, and her third, The Accidental, for which she received the 2005 Whitbread novel award. Her fondness for the grandscale and her employment of shifting perspectives, formal risk-taking and rich language all mark Smith out as a "literary" writer, but her confident, inventive tales also display a humour which lightens the ambitious themes she covers. Her penchant for wordplay and the pleasure she takes in the outlandish and idiosyncratic have, however, given rise to the criticism that she can on occasion stray a little too far into the arch. Recommended worksWithout easy resolutions -- and with some odd choices (the way Eve abandons her children, in particular, is a bit hard to swallow) -- it's an often fascinating, occasionally confounding read. This is really hard book to rate. I really enjoyed the writing style and the way the story was told. Ali Smith’s writing style was a little hard to get into at first. She writes in a stream of consciousness style and doesn’t use and punctuation to denote speech. But once I was used to it, it was easy to read. I never got confused as to who was speaking. Who is Amber? Is she a con artist, a pathological liar, a psychic, a soothsayer, a malevolent force of nature, a witch, an angel? What profound effects, good and bad, does she have on each member of the Smart family? Each of these parts is preceded by a brief section from the accidental of the title, Alhambra/Amber. 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.

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. (...) The Accidental has an infectious sense of fun and invention. The story goes through some surprising reversals and arrives at a satisfying conclusion, which is also a beginning. But afterwards, it's the child's voice you remember: it is Astrid's book." - Steven Poole, The Guardian As Amber insinuates herself into the family, the questions of who she is and how she’s come to be there drop away. Instead, dazzled by her seeming exoticism, the Smarts begin to examine the accidents of their lives through the searing lens of Amber’s perceptions. When Eve finally banishes her from the cottage, Amber disappears from their sight, but not—they discover when they return home to London—from their profoundly altered lives. If Amber's sudden entry & stay with the Smarts requires willing suspension of disbelief, it is because it's indeed a fabrication! If the Smarts are like a bunch of cliches: a randy academic undergoing a mid-life crisis, a self-absorbed, negligent writer-mother-wife, an angsty teen, a surly & confused adolescent; they are. Derelict of parental and professional duty? Neither parent is engaged in their children's lives, to the children's detriment -- and both parents are engaged in unethical and legally questionable activities and in their respective work lives.Set in 2003, the novel consists of three parts: "The Beginning," "Middle" and "The End". Each part contains four separate narrations, one focusing on each member of the Smart family: Eve, the mother, Michael, her husband, Astrid (12) and Magnus (17), two children of Eve's from a previous marriage (to Adam Berenski). Opening and closing the novel, and between each part, we have four sections of first-person narration from 'Alhambra' – who we can assume is Amber, the Smarts' uninvited house-guest.

Eva has achieved some success with a series of books called the Genuine Article Series -- "autobiotruefictinterviews", written in question-and-answer form. Michael is a professor of English, but his main pursuit appears to be that of his young female students. The narrative's heavy & repeated emphasis on the hermetic world of cinema— it's an artificial construct, a world within a world & the plot mirrors that, its constant preoccupation with images/photographs & their reality (the infamous human pyramid pic from the Iraq invasion of 2003 finds a place here), the ephemerality of the moment behind them, its interwoven motifs of light & darkness through which the characters fumble towards a clear-seeing perspective, all stress It is about actually seeing, being there. Are the readers alert enough to take the hint to pay attention to the artifice? The Accidental is playfully but also sensibly experimental, the different styles and approaches providing texture in a way that makes the story more real than a more straightforward rendering would have. One day, she finds a beautiful letter that her father wrote to her mother when they were still courting each other. This seems to have made her realize that their family was once a happy one. When the father was not yet having extra-marital affairs with his students, the son hasn't been the cause of his classmate suicide and the mother hasn't lost touch of the reality in her life. The reason why I said this is that towards the end when Astrid kisses her mother, "Eve was moved beyond believe by the kiss." It reminded me that we sometimes all get to busy with our everyday tasks and we forget kissing and hugging our loved ones. This is kind of a cliche but true.

READERS GUIDE

Murray, Noel (21 February 2006). "The Accidental". The A.V. Club. Archived from the original on 16 May 2008 . Retrieved 19 April 2008. While it's not generally the characters themselves that narrate the sections focussed on them, Smith does inhabit their minds and provides an intimate perspective.