Everything is Meant Ali Smith's prize-winning novel is a gem. BY MOLLY TEMPLETON THE ACCIDENTAL, fiction by Ali Smith. Pantheon Books, 2006. Hardcover, $22.95. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Whitbread Award for Best Novel of the Year. From the first page, The Accidental works to put the reader in a strange place, not only with Ali Smith's rolling, sometimes delirious prose, but with the book's design. Page numbers are atypically located; the text is only aligned to the left, leaving the right margin a jagged line. Movie titles, song titles, albums, dialogue — nothing in the text is set off with italics or quotation marks, encouraging the eye to move more rapidly across the page. The physical book backs up the story, asking you to give in, to accept the odd, dreamy, uncomfortable results a stranger's appearance has on one English family. As the summer starts, the Smarts — Astrid, 12, and Magnus, 17, two children from a previous marriage of blocked writer Eve, who's remarried philandering professor Michael — are vacationing in Norfolk. Their vacation home, according to Astrid, is "substandard," her favorite, oft-repeated word at the time that Amber appears, claiming her car broke down on the road. To Michael, Amber is "a bit raddled, maybe thirty, maybe older, tanned like a hitchhiker, dressed like a road protester, one of those older women still determinedly being a girl." To Magnus, "She is very beautiful, a little rough-looking, like a beautiful used girl off an internet site." Each Smart thinks she's there for a different reason, but she isn't one of Michael's students, an interviewer looking for Eve, an angel or "something to do with the house." And each Smart is completely beguiled by her. She charms Astrid with her strange statements and actions, seduces Magnus, literally shakes up Eve, and throws Michael into a state in which he thinks "a girl called Amber walked across a room / and everything became a new-made poem." Michael's narrative, after a few weeks of Amber's company, is shocked into poetry, flights on Shakespeare and cummings in which he wonders, "Did the heart fuck the mind with all its slummings?" Between the tidily organized beginning, middle and end sections — each divided into fourths, one for the perspective of each Smart — a fifth character speaks: Alhambra, conceived in a cinema in 1968, who travels in language through the film of the late 20th century, leaving a train of references and images in her wake. "Believe me," she says. "Everything is meant." Meant, yes, but true? That's a different issue entirely. Is Alhambra Amber? Is anything either of the characters says true? Amber is unbearable and endearing; so, in turns, are the Smarts, though Smith is at her best with Astrid, whose slightly precocious voice is madly funny and sometimes, in a perfectly teenage way, disarmingly perceptive. "If her mother and Michael knew this they would literally have kittens," she thinks about her tossed-away mobile phone, on which classmates were sending her cruel messages. In the book's last section, Astrid's interaction with an unsuspecting salesboy is the sort of dialogue television writers dream of and almost always miss. In a lesser writer's hands, The Accidental might have become simply one of those semi-stuffy, self-important explorations of the deep cracks under the surface of the modern family. But Smith is on to much more than that. She's set her story in a specific, recognizable time, but it's never anything but timeless; she's taken familiar types and made them seem, through their rich interior lives, like strikingly new voices. And with each of those voices she tells a story about the stories we tell ourselves: the ones with rough edges that are like poking a sore tooth with your tongue, the comforting ones that make sense of things, and the ones that no one else knows, that we only tell in our own heads. The Accidental is a work of immense talent and precision crafting, thought-provoking but unpretentious, and more than worth losing yourself in for a time.   BOOK NOTES: "Unleashing Your Primitive Dog" lecture by John Reed, 6:30 pm 1/12, Baker Downtown Center. $10 donation for non-Mid-Valley Willamette Writers members … Elissa Minor Rust (The Prisoner Pear: Stories from the Lake) reads, 7:30 pm 1/13, Powell's on Burnside, Portland … Writers of the Future signing with Stephen Stanley, Ken Scholes, David Goldman and Jay Lake, 1 pm 1/14, Barnes & Noble … Writers of the Future discussion and signing with Ken Brady, David Goldman, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Jay Lake, Bruce Holland Rogers, Stephen Stanley, Eric Witchey and J. Steven York, 4 pm 1/14, Tsunami Books … Eugene Poetry Slam Round IV with featured poet Alvin Lau, 8 pm 1/14, Territorial Winery. www.eugenepoetryslam.com$5, $3 under 18 … Short story writer Gina Ochsner and poet George Estreich read, 7 pm 1/17, Downtown Library … Rick Steber reads and discusses Buy the Chief a Cadillac, 7 pm 1/18, Knight Library, UO … Marilynne Robinson speaks, 7:30 pm 1/19, Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Portland. $25, college/seniors $18, high school $5 … Poet Steven Stern speaks, 7:30 pm 1/20, Valley Library Main Rotunda, OSU, Corvallis … Maura Conlon-McIvor (She's All Eyes) reads, 1 pm 1/22, Borders Books … StringTown Press reading including Sibyl James, Karin Temple, Joshua Weber and Rodger Moody, 4 pm 1/22, Tsunami Books … John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man) reads, 7:30 pm 1/22, Powell's on Burnside, Portland … Karen Fisher reads and discusses A Sudden Country, 7 pm 1/24, Knight Library, UO … Recently announced recipients of Oregon Literary Fellowships include Eugeneans Keetje Kuipers, Caleb McKenzie, Sarah Gianelli and Seth Clark Walker.
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