Ali Smith is in the big league now with this latest novel, up for all the prizes. For some reason, the blurb inside the cover slightly put me off- it makes the book seem much more obscure and arrogant than is actually the case.

A young woman appears at the holiday home of an affluent, middle-class family; he is a lecherous lecturer, constantly shagging students for grades, and she is a writer, recreating the afterlives of real people who have been dead for some time. Their children (well, hers) are a boy who has caused a schoolgirl's suicide, and a girl who films everything. Into this peculiar and tense environment comes Amber, the stranger. She's described as slightly rough, she sleeps in her car, she doesn't actually ever say who she is or why she's there, but each member of this dysfunctional family are drawn to her, sexually or emotionally, until their lives started to individually unravel and eventually implode.

The structure of the book is as interesting as its characters; interior monologues are spliced together oddly with the narrative, and it's never clear whose voice is telling the story; or who Amber really is, or why she comes- and goes. I found myself constantly looking for clues, and at the end, trying to re-read the book and find answers, but this is testament to Smith's ability to hold the reader in a tangled web for so long. The writing is very fine, if not the gut-wrenching prose of earlier writing Hotel World, which won her so many fans. This feels like a very grown-up novel- and there's nothing wrong with that, but somehow it left me ever so slightly disatisfied, like eating something from Pret A Manger... if you know what I mean. You know it's been good for you, and you've enjoyed it, but what, exactly, is missing?

You're obviously far more literary than I am, Anna! I couldn't bear it and had to give up, for my sanity's sake, by p20!...

==:O

A
xxx

I am replying to this a bit late, I realise, but have only just joined, which is why.

I, too, am mystified by what is 'wrong' with this novel. I mean, it's great writing and it's structurally unique, etc etc. It irritated me at times because of its insistence on 'literariness' - ie the man who is an English professor - because I do recoil from the pain-in-the-arse over-educated English Literature graduates (of which I am one) who write only for other pain-in-the-arse English graduates. But overall, I did like it.

However. It did not move me. Partly, I wonder whether this is because the characters, although great and vividly drawn, are all essentially unlikeable. Ultimately, I didn't give a toss what happened to them, and if the English professor man or any of his family had met with a tragic end, I probably would have thought, 'Oh, well.'

I think I found it bereft of emotion, or that genuine emotion was second in importance to Being Clever.