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.
