Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Ali Smith
Hamish Hamilton 2008
Three of these stories are very good indeed. In one a woman finds a baby in her shopping trolley when in Tesco’s. She can’t convince anyone it’s not hers and so she is stuck with it. This becomes especially vexing when said baby starts making jokes worthy of Bernard Manning. She’s left with only one solution. In the second a woman’s fourteen-year-old self comes to live with her. In the third a woman is driven from a pub by an overbearing male drinker. All threemade me think about something other than the mechanics of story-telling. It’s when she gets on her post-modern hobby horse and comes over all meta that I lose patience with Ali Smith. I know that stories aren’t true but contain elements of truth; I know they are constructed; I know that “I” doesn’t always refer to the author. Therefore I found the little episodes where she plays around with these concepts profoundly annoying. This is a pity, as she writes well, and knows how to tell a story when she’s not getting too self-referential. Perhaps it’s just me.
27 June 2010
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth91
See also: The Accidental
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