Ali Smith
I have a new hero: Ali Smith. I read a short story of hers in The Whole Story and Other Stories and was completely hooked. I spent the last few months hunting down everything she’s written and devouring it all.
My absolute favorite of hers is Hotel World. Why, you ask. Because the woman is quite simply a genius with language. Hotel World is sort of a novel, sort of a collection of interconnected short stories that center around a hotel and the tragic events that took place there. It starts with a story told from the point of a view of the girl who died in that hotel and good ghod can Ali Smith write! It’s disjointed and haunting and absolutely right for a girl who’s confused and hasn’t quite gotten the hang of being dead yet. It then takes up the POV of completely different women who are affected directly and indirectly by this girl’s death.
All of Ali Smith’s work is absolutely breathtaking and it’s full of the fantastical everyday I absolutely love (see Kelly Link, Jeanette Winterson, etc.) (an old woman in one story is haunted by a bagpipe band), but Hotel World stands out for me because it does something completely unexpected. Ali Smith’s writing is ‘experimental’ in the best sense of the word. It’s still accessible despite the way she twists and folds language because it feels like the true voice of the characters. It feels like transcribed thought and that’s a hell of a trick to master. It’s murder on the language. As an experimental ‘lit fic’ writer, I was expecting a certain type of ending from Ms. Smith. Something detached. There’s a definite trend to the cool (I’m talking temperature here) and unemotional in literary fiction. As if emotion and passion and longing are relegated to ‘genre’ fiction. As the pages dwindled in Hotel World I was gripped with terror at the thought that it would end with a detached shrug like so many ‘literary’ novels, but Ms. Smith went there. I won’t give away the details, but it was absolutely, completely, and utterly right. I cried my eyes out and I mean that in the best way possible. Not just because of the story, but the language that made the story. Everything comes together (language, characterization, story, etc.) and just resonates. Thank you Ali Smith.
As for Hotel World, I agreee entirely. Terrific book. What else do you recommend?
[…] I’ve raved about Smith’s work before, but I stumbled on this (sadly, out of print) novel and put it above my monitor so I could stare at it longingly while I wrote papers on neo-liberalism and (groan) Foucault. It was more than worth the tortuous wait. As I raved before Ali Smith is a fucking master of language and she uses that mastery to construct characters as fluid as her prose. Nothing (and no one) is as it seems in Like. The first section, Amy, seems at first to be told from the POV of Amy, an apparently dyslexic (or simply illiterate) working class, young mother of 8 year-old Kate, but the POV shifts dizzyingly from Amy to Kate to minor characters Smith manages to construct whole and gleaming from the literary equivalent of thin air. The second and final section is Ash’s ’story’ and the reader must unravel their connection like a complex murder mystery (with no murder) because the characters are not much help with the big picture. Then again, what ‘character’ is? Or could be? Smith leaves ‘clues’ scattered throughout (I found myself thumbing back to some obscure ‘description repeatedly to make sure), but they’re not the kind of clues you’re used to and they point someplace so heartbreakingly clear yet elusive. Impossible. Like looking up to the sun for answers. But, like the best mysteries, you can’t help but look. […]