Hardcover, 306 pages
English language
Published Oct. 8, 2006 by Pantheon Books.
Winner of the Whitbread Award for best novel and a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, "The Accidental" is the virtuoso new novel by the singularly gifted Ali Smith. Jonathan Safran Foer has called her writing "thrilling." Jeanette Winterson has praised her for her "style, ideas, and punch." Here, in a novel at once profound, playful, and exhilaratingly inventive, she transfixes us with a portrait of a family unraveled by a mysterious visitor.
Amber--thirtysomething and barefoot--shows up at the door of the Norfolk cottage that the Smarts are renting for the summer. She talks her way in. She tells nothing but lies. She stays for dinner.
Eve Smart, the author of a best-selling series of biographical reconstructions, thinks Amber is a student with whom her husband, Michael, is sleeping. Michael, an English professor, knows only that her car broke down. Daughter Astrid, age twelve, thinks she's her mother's friend. Son …
Winner of the Whitbread Award for best novel and a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, "The Accidental" is the virtuoso new novel by the singularly gifted Ali Smith. Jonathan Safran Foer has called her writing "thrilling." Jeanette Winterson has praised her for her "style, ideas, and punch." Here, in a novel at once profound, playful, and exhilaratingly inventive, she transfixes us with a portrait of a family unraveled by a mysterious visitor.
Amber--thirtysomething and barefoot--shows up at the door of the Norfolk cottage that the Smarts are renting for the summer. She talks her way in. She tells nothing but lies. She stays for dinner.
Eve Smart, the author of a best-selling series of biographical reconstructions, thinks Amber is a student with whom her husband, Michael, is sleeping. Michael, an English professor, knows only that her car broke down. Daughter Astrid, age twelve, thinks she's her mother's friend. Son Magnus, age seventeen, thinks she's an angel.
As Amber insinuates herself into the family, the questions of who she is and how she's come to be there drop away. Instead, dazzled by her seeming exoticism, the Smarts begin to examine the accidents of their lives through the searing lens of Amber's perceptions. When Eve finally banishes her from the cottage, Amber disappears from their sight, but not--they discover when they return home to London--from their profoundly altered lives.
Fearlessly intelligent and written with an irresistible blend of lyricism and whimsy, "The Accidental" is a tour de force of literary improvisation that explores the nature of truth, the role of chance, and the transformative power of storytelling. (front flap)
A Super-TOB comment said it best: "September 2020 was not the right time for me to read The Accidental. I can appreciate what Ali Smith was trying to do, but my brain needs more plot and less introspection right now."
This was a weird book. Not that is wasn't enjoyable because it was. But what makes it weird is the reader is at a loss as to if the character of Amber was malevolent or benevolent. Were the characters that encountered Amber's unique form of "friendship" better off by knowing her? Who was Amber? Where did she come from, where did she go? Was her visit premeditated? All these questions are left ultimately to the imagination of the reader. And what about that ending? What was that all about?
