A favorite bit of advice about writing criticism is from Anthony Lane, in the introduction to his collection “Nobody’s Perfect.” It’s just five words: “Never read the publicity material.” The problem, he writes, is that the provided synopses deliver “a false impression of coherence.” My corollary to Lane’s maxim would be: “Even dust jackets.”
Ali Smith’s new novel, “Summer,” is the concluding volume in her immersive, prickly and politically ardent seasonal quartet. The previous novels in the series, “Autumn,” “Winter” and “Spring,” appeared in 2017, 2018 and 2019, respectively.
Each has been on the beat of the world’s news, from Brexit to Trump to wildfires in Australia to immigrant detainees to, now, the arrival of Covid-19. (You imagine her at the printing plant, dictating final touches as the presses churn.) Each has been like a push notice that clicks open in your mind.
They’ve been boon companions, these novels. It’s hard to say if they’ll hold up as lasting works of art, but they’re certainly here right now. And later, as John Maynard Keynes said, we’ll all be dead.
I’ll provide a synopsis of “Summer,” of a sort. But to properly enter this novel, as with the previous books in the series, you’ve got to be willing to get a bit lost. In Smith’s hands, stories slipstream in the wake of other stories; dreams are tucked up under the armpits of serious shifts in time and space. There are no directional arrows Scotch-taped to the floor.
Smith writes about yardbird intellects, refugees from good taste and urban ease; her characters are shabby-genteel with the gentility knob turned down pretty low.
Smith is from Scotland. I’ve compared the shambolic intelligence and left-of-the-dial vision of her recent novels to the work of the film director Mike Leigh (whose name has become synonymous with “a bit tatty,” as in “this van you’re living in is a bit Mike Leigh”) and the art-music collective known as The Mekons.
When we get momentarily baffled in a Smith novel, we don’t, like Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, sit and scratch our hindquarters. We’re with the author, banging down bosky mental paths. She trusts that we’ll eventually notice the trail blazes on the rocks. She’s writing about the state of her own soul at the moment, and meaning can be up for grabs.
I began this review with Lane’s maxim because critics hate to be lost. We’re control freaks, most of us. We like to feel we can tack down the four corners of any situation, even in high wind. It’s a mental habit worth breaking. It’s potty training in reverse.
In “Summer,” characters reappear from the earlier novels in the series. There’s Daniel Gluck, whom we first met in “Autumn” as a 101-year-old former songwriter. There’s Art and Charlotte, the vaguely annoying nature bloggers from “Winter.” Also from “Winter,” there’s Iris, a lifelong political rabble-rouser.
It’s good to see them all again, but you don’t have to read the previous novels to gain entrance here.
Two of the central characters in “Summer” are siblings, Sacha and Robert. She’s 16; he’s three years younger. They respond differently to the world they’ve been brought into.
Sacha is so woke that she won’t ride in a car because it uses fossil fuels. Robert plays violent video games and admires Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s political Svengali. (To admire anything to do with Brexit, if you’re an adult in an Ali Smith novel, is to be among the especially damned.) Robert makes mischief. He throws the family’s Amazon Alexa into the sea, saying “Alexa, tell us how to do the breast stroke.” Covid has chucked their plans out the window.
Their mother, Grace, is a former actress with a large store of memories. Their father moved in with a younger woman but still lives right next door.
This novel has a lot to say about political prisoners and immigrant detainees of all stripes, from World War I up to the present day. Efforts are made to help some of them. Smith’s characters access what Susan Sontag called “a little civic fortitude.” There’s a meditation on the work of the Italian filmmaker Lorenza Mazzetti.
Along the way there is a good deal of talk about evanescence — of summertime and everything else. “You can’t put a pin through a summer,” one character says. Leave it to Robert, the malcontent, to compare summer to “the smell round a rubbish truck as it moves through the city and like you’re stuck on a bike behind it going way too slowly down a too-narrow street.”
This novel made me laugh, quite a lot, as the generations wage war. There’s a moment when Sacha wants to use BrainyQuote, the egregious quotations website, as the source for a Hannah Arendt quote in a paper she’s writing.
Grace sets her straight about the importance of solid sourcing. But Sacha gets her “OK boomer”-style digs in anyway. “Worrying about stuff like this was what her mother’s generation did as displacement activity from worrying about the real things happening in the world,” she thinks. She says: “Return yourself forthwith to the age of pointless educational pedantry.”
Grace gets the last word, and if Smith’s seasonal novels have a motto, it is spoken here: “The level of attention I’m talking about is necessary for everything.”
The pandemic sneaks in at the margins of this novel. The drawings of the virus, Sacha thinks, “all look a bit like little planets with trumpets coming out of their surface, or little worlds covered in spikes of growth, a little world that’s been shot all over its surface by those fairground darts with tuft tails from the old-fashioned rifle ranges, or like mines in the sea in films about WW2.”
Smith’s seasonal novels can be pretty on-the-nose, politically. Sometimes they veer into the saccharine. The water, here and there, turns brackish. But as with a strong river, their motion is fundamentally self-purifying.
“Summer” is a prose poem in praise of memory, forgiveness, getting the joke and seizing the moment. “Whatever age you are,” one character comments, “you still die too young.”
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Ali Smith’s ‘Summer’ Ends a Funny, Political, Very Up-to-Date Quartet - The New York Times
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