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Lots of writers are my favourite writers. There are lots of books I'm still in dialogue with, books tugging at my ideas about what stories are and how they should be told and what meaning a story may have and what exactly is so wonderful about some words. Some writers speak to me with an honesty that's firmly tied to their idiosyncrasy. It's always startling to 'hear' a literary voice so distinctive that it's almost (but never quite) rude to the story. I reckon Ali Smith writes with that kind of power. But let's see... just so you know what kind of reader you're dealing with... I get suspicious of people if they've read Ntozake Shange and don't think she's the king, the king. I'm suspicious of folk who've read Marianne Dreams and don't proffer superlatives. I am very suspicious indeed of people who've read Emily Dickinson and don't seem to want to trouble themselves to untangle her. I know it's not cool to be quite so intense about books, but replace those names with some of your favourite writers and we'll sort of see eye to eye. I just finished – and fell in love with – Dara Horn's beautiful, crazily-brave book The World to Come. But it's such a new relationship that I'm scared to talk about it... I... you know... don't really know where we stand... (imagine me shyly fluttering my eyelashes).
So, just as I intended to when I started writing this, I'll chit-chat about Ali Smith. Smith's writing has heart, it has sparkle and chat, it is sincere, yet it's got jokes. I discovered Hotel World in hardback when I was in secondary school. I was sixteen years old, and dying, like everybody is, feeling the dying, like lots of people do. I picked the book up in the local library because I thought I'd better give The Bell Jar a rest. Also because when I did the beginning - middle - end (or in this case the past - present historical - future conditional dip) I found this on the second to last page of the book:
remember
you
must
live
remember
you
most
love
remainder
you
mist
leaf
Yet the beginning talked about a fall and had words like 'smash' 'mush' 'gashed' and 'end' in it... There's nothing like a great book to put a temporary halt to suicide ideation; temporary being the best kind of halt to it that we can hope for. Two schooldays and a weekend disappeared into bed with this book and me as I crept through the pages, thinking can she – are you allowed to – do narrative like this? Make it so that words move when the story moves, skittering away from each other on the page when there is too much force for them to hold them together? And the stutters in the tale stunned me, those parts where, in her growing more richly sensate, the dead narrator grows forgetful of the words for things like 'eyes' and 'world'. What a voice to give to dying, as if the process of it hurtles on beyond the stopped heartbeat and the mirror that comes away mistless when held to the lips.
But then Ali Smith does short stories too, and doesn't disappoint. She doesn't forget that the point is the story, but neither does she forget that without a touch of otherness, no story can be a true re-imagining of the value at the heart of the versions told before it. Of course, in fiction people have been followed by silent, morbid visions before – substitute the Hanging Girl in Smith's short story of the same name for the staring green monkey in LeFanu's short story 'Green Tea' – but the consequences are boldly, frankly substituted. Rather than calling the woman who can see her to follow her to the grave, the hanged girl makes a hobby of swinging like a pendulum beneath the kitchen clock. Such behaviour is perhaps, the story's narrator suggests, the hanged girl's attempt at being amusing.
I could also make approving noises about The Accidental, but will refrain because a bunch of prize judges have already, and very recently, too. What I mean to say is: all in all, Ali Smith is pretty pretty pretty pretty good (to borrow a phrase from Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm). C'est tout.
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