Near the end of her previous collection Other Stories and other stories (1999), one of Ali Smith’s many nameless narrators huddles in bed on an icy January night and asks her lover to tell her “a story that’s a story”. “Right then”, comes the reply, “there was once a child whose mother fell asleep. The end.”

Is that it? I said.
What else do you need to know? you said.

The question might as well be: What makes a story a story? Smith enjoys asking. Her short fiction teasingly strips narrative of its everyday garments of plot and characterization, to see how much fun can be had with what is underneath. Yet the nature of her experiment is not to seek some philosophical or aesthetic gratification. It has more to do with the plain-vanilla pleasures of reading, such as wanting to find out what happens next, or caring about a made-up person. Smith knows that a reader is rarely more rapt than at the start of a story; accordingly, her tales just keep beginning. “This one is about two people who have just gone to bed together for the first time”, promises a story from this new collection. As if: only a paragraph and a half later, the lovers “holding each other in nothing but skin” (“One of them even has quite a bad cold and the other doesn’t care”) are dismissed – “enough of them” – and Smith beckons us towards

a woman living in a street of terrace houses, a street on which so many cars are parked that it makes driving the fortnightly refuse-collector truck down it quite difficult, [who] has just hit one of the dustmen who routinely empty the wheelie bins every second Tuesday morning over the head with a garden spade.

Naturally we don’t find out why. Soon we forget that we cared, wanting instead to know more about the holidaymakers who fell victim to a con trick in the Mediterranean, about the end of a relationship (“the woman has begun to despise him, he saw it on Saturday evening, when he was cutting courgettes into strips for a stir-fry, he saw it cross her face”), about the man ashamed that a child saw him cruelly hosing down a cat. These half-tales, and more – a soldier’s death, a girlfriend’s well-intentioned deceit – are spliced into a single fiction (“The third person”), and the trick works with each transition: carefully chosen details, simply related, free of development or resolution, are stories enough.

It helps that Smith is so funny. In her novel The Accidental (2005), twelve-year-old Astrid thinks about Icarus, “who had the wings his father made which the sun melted when he flew too close”, and wonders

what the difference would have been if the father had made the wings for a girl instead, who maybe would have known how to use them properly. But probably this would depend on how old the girl was, because if she was Astrid’s age it would be okay. But . . . if she was any older she would be worrying about people seeing up her skirt and the sun melting her eye make-up.

The colloquializing of myth, the pursuit of blue-sky thinking to its mundane end, the sugar-coated kernel of critique – already the child senses that some subtle sexual hegemony might hold women back – this is classic Smith. The First Person and other stories gives further evidence that she is a virtuoso of the snappy what-if? riff. In “The child”, a supermarket shopper returns to her trolley to find it swapped for one with a crying infant in it. She asks a member of staff if anybody has reported a missing boy; they haven’t. As passing customers compliment her on her son’s beauty, the woman panics. But the instant she takes the boy in her arms, he stops crying. (“The crowd round us made knowing noises. See? a woman said . . . You don’t need to be scared, love.”) It feels a bit like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but Smith has something more lively up her sleeve. The woman gives up trying to persuade the shop staff that she isn’t the boy’s mother, and puts him in her car.

You’re a really rubbish driver, a voice said from the back . . . . I could do better than that, and I can’t even drive. Are you for instance representative of all women drivers or is it just you among all women who’s so rubbish at driving?

That is only the beginning. In “a voice as young and clear as a series of ringing bells”, the child explains that “the pound is our rightful heritage” and insists that “asylum-seekers . . . should all be sent back”. “Why did they send premenstrual women into the desert to fight the Iraqis?” (“Because they can retain water for four days.”) “What do you call a woman with two brain cells?” (“Pregnant!”) “Can we go somewhere with broadband or wifi so I can look at some porn?” His unwitting guardian isn’t disgusted, but “enchanted”; breastfeeding the boy, she is already “planning how to ensure [his] enrolment in one of the area’s better secondary schools”. The pessimistic parable of maternity makes you laugh, even as you retreat uncertainly.

If being a woman is sometimes burdensome in Smith’s fiction, being a gay woman seldom brings extra pressure. “Writ”, another what-if? story, reunites the narrator with her fourteen-year-old self, considering the advice that she might give. “Don’t be alarmed . . . when you find yourself liking girls as well as boys. It’s okay. It’s good . . . . Don’t even bother yourself worrying about it, not for a single afternoon, not for a single hour in a single afternoon.” Women kiss on “a busy street . . . in broad daylight”, and it’s a big deal for nobody but the women kissing. Even the sniggering saloon-bar bigots in Smith’s Ovid-in-Inverness tale Girl Meets Boy (2007), who welcome the statistic that “teenagers who are gay are six times more likely to kill themselves than teenagers who aren’t”, are odious rather than dangerous.

Sexuality generates less tension here than what one narrator calls “the doom of middle-classness”. The characters in The First Person and other stories buy the Guardian in Waitrose while shopping for organic apples and Kalamata olives; they have illicit trysts in £120-a-night beds, Beethoven on the iPod; when a fire exit needs wedging open, a broadsheet Arts & Books supplement comes readily to hand. Shopping makes a surprisingly substantial contribution to the sense of self. “Writ” plays this point for laughs, when the strongly accented fourteen-year-old doesn’t yet have the fortysomething’s savvy about skincare products, nor her taste for good coffee; in “Astute fiery luxurious”, Smith approaches anger. A woman incapacitated by injury receives a parcel of soiled pyjamas with a note reading “W H o S A n A U G H t Y B o Y t H E n”. When her partner returns from work, they sleeplessly watch “an I Love 1980s programme, one we’d watched twice before”:

We were talking about how it became possible that there never was a miners’ strike, a war, a right-wing landslide, a massive recession or any huge protest march; instead there were only Rubik’s cubes, Transformers and a puppet TV compere shaped like a rat.

While the rest of the story takes a typically Smithian tangent, explaining the words in the title by abandoning the mystery of the parcel for a new story about schoolgirls shooting squirrels with air rifles, the suspicion lingers that a political point is being made at the narrator’s expense. The couple wonder how history became only a list of stuff bought and watched, but they may themselves be complicit; in a detail easily overlooked on a first reading, the narrator’s inability to move is the painful result of her own consumerist nostalgia: “Last week we were in the supermarket and saw they were selling Swingball. I hadn’t played it for twenty years . . .”.

Although it defies easy summary, no review of The First Person and other stories should end without mentioning the opening piece, “True short story”, an emotive mixture of memoir, fiction and literary criticism. Its narrator, “Ali”, overhears two men talking about “the difference between the novel and the short story”. The novel, the younger man explains, is “a flabby old whore”, “slack and loose”, while the story is a “slim nymph . . . still in very good shape”. (The fleshly analogy comes from a speech by Alex Linklater, the deputy editor of Prospect, delivered to inaugurate the National Short Story Prize.) Ali phones her friend “Kasia” – the author and academic Kasia Boddy, thanked in each of Smith’s books – to ask what she thinks.

Listen. Is the short story a goddess and a nymph and is the novel an old whore?
Is what what? she said.

Kasia “knows quite a lot about the short story”, having “spent a lot of her life reading them, writing about them, teaching them” in a “life-so-far act of love”; she is in a cancer ward (“a couple of years ago now”). It is enough to say that “True short story” contains much of what makes Ali Smith such a good writer: that “life-so-far”, for instance – an artfully artless tinkering with cliché that shows clearly what lies at stake, without fuss. The story has a light touch, but its impact is profound; it is the best thing in a fine book.

Ali Smith
THE FIRST PERSON
And other stories
207pp. Hamish Hamilton. £16.99.
978 0 241 14426 8

Anthony Cummins’s essays on Émile Zola and late Victorian Britain are published in the Review of English Studies and the Victorian Review.

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