The Accidental

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Autumn” and “Winter,” novels full of political foreboding, are also brief and almost breezy—topical, sweet-natured, something fun to be inside.

Down the grand main stairs leading out on to the street, where my mother would go in a few minutes' time with her nylons rolled in a warm ball in her coat pocket, swinging her shoes in her hand by their strappy backs, Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer smiled out from behind their frames exactly like they'd still be smiling, faded and glamorous, a decade out of date, at the blaze of light that blackened the staircase five years later when the junior projectionist (cheated out of a job he believed was his; the management had hired a new projectionist from the city when the old projectionist died) gutted the building with a tin of creosote and the dropped end of his cigarette. Although the novel dazzles with the richness of language and ideas, it retains a delicious lightness. He had felt these things, yes, more acutely, more truly, more surprisedly, than he had maybe felt anything since he was, oh, he didn’t know, a fresh-faced (cliché! Eve’s son from her first marriage, Magnus, is paralyzed by guilt for his part in a prank that led, unintentionally, to the suicide of a fellow student.

But Smith’s capacious art warmly embraces variety, and creates eccentric stylistic families out of disparate inheritances: “English” whimsy sits easily enough alongside “Scottish” postmodernism; the realistic premises of conventional bourgeois fiction (families on holiday, unfaithful spouses, unhappy children, difficult parents) are regularly disrupted by surreal, experimental, or anarchic elements (time travel, ghosts, digressions, adaptations of late Shakespearean romances, and, in “Winter,” apparitions such as a floating head and a piece of landscape that hangs over a dining table, visible only to one of the characters). All together these narratives show Smith to be, among other wonders, a master of the use of free indirect style. And much of the comedy and the fundamental cheerfulness in Smith’s work has to do, I think, with the figurative consolations the pun embodies: that life is generative, and that, even as things split apart, they can be brought together.

But for this novel to work you have to believe Amber leads the way to discovery in her disciples or victims and for me this only really worked with the pitch perfect Astrid. Magnus is in a horrible limbo of probation pending investigation of his role in internet bullying of a girl that led to her suicide. They will be forever changed by Amber but how will they know whether it is for the bad, the good or something else entirely? Michael is a professor of English, but his main pursuit appears to be that of his young female students.

Which is not to say that the other characters are exactly bland, only that they don't radiate the same sense of discovery.