In this collection, she’s also exploring the compressed nature of the short story and testing its limits. Yet her leftist politics always hover somewhere in the background, and often take over the foreground in mini-lectures. Her preferred mode is meta- and stream-of-consciousness, a perspective attuned more to the inner life than to big-picture social reality.

(In her last book, the Whitbread Award-winning novel “The Accidental,” a central character may be just a phantasm, a projection of the other characters’ desires and fears.) She’s got a paradoxical, original style. Smith’s writing presents the constant threat of liftoff from the laws of physics. The nameless romantic couple may be the same people from story to story, or not. In these stories, as in the rest of the collection, certain details are hard to pin down, and that’s partly the point. When, in the collection’s last story, “The First Person,” the lovers appear to have drifted back together, even the most hardened cynic might grant them a smile. They don’t appear chronologically, but considered together these stories about an on-again, off-again relationship have a stealthy emotional resonance. Soon you’re both laughing, which, the narrator says, “fills me with hope and sadness both at the same time.” It’s also a good description of the effect of the best stories in “The First Person” - the five that, like “No Exit,” have Smith’s first-person narrator talking directly to “you,” her beloved. You hang up the phone.īut then you call back, and this time you have something to tell her. In several of the stories in the British writer Ali Smith’s new collection, the narrator is furious - at someone she addresses simply as “you.” In “No Exit,” “you” and she are not even together anymore, not really, but she calls you at 3 a.m., “just wondering how you are.” Then she rambles into a strange account of a blocked fire-exit door at a movie house, which has caused a moral dilemma only you can help her with.

The accidental by ali smith