John Berger, 2002Smith, I suspect, does not intend us to read Berger's statement ironically, because The Accidental, deserved Booker-nominee and Whitbread Best Novel-winner, can be seen as an attempt to redress the balance. We need stories about now, not more peddled old nonsense about then." (82)It's a viewpoint that resonates interestingly with one of the novel's epigraphs (Smith is greedy, and offers five, from sources as diverse as Austen and Chaplin): Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous. The dissenting voice is given to The Independent, where a reviewer says of the most recent title, which focuses on a German-born woman, secretly Jewish but outwardly a good Nazi mother: "When will writers and readers finally stop hanging around mendacious glorified stories of a war which may as well by now have happened planets away from this one? Smart's Genuine Articles are a prime example of our shameful attraction to anything that lets us feel both fake-guilty and morally justified.
They are also fashionable, attracting considerable attention (there is talk of one being chosen by Richard and Judy for their book club) and almost-unanimously favourable press notices. She writes 'autobiotruefictinterviews', books that take ordinary people who died young and tell their story as though they had lived on. About a quarter of the way into Ali Smith's lively tale of a disrupted family holiday and its aftermath, we learn exactly what it is that the mother, Eve Smart, does for a living.
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