and Ali Smith ...

The Accidental - three wins and so on to tomorrow's final vs Home Land. I think I am pleased with how this is going.

round 1 Nell James judges Neil Gaiman vs. Ali Smith:
What makes The Accidental involving is the highly conceptual narrative form and prose style.

round 2 Maud Newton judges Cormac McCarthy vs. Ali Smith:
Unfortunately, as in her prior Hotel World, Smith’s wordplay is nearly as distracting as it is spellbinding. I frequently had the sense that the author was not breathing life into her characters so much as ventriloquizing her own observations through them. ..seeking the most innovative description of a sensation instead of the most apt. Tinny originality would be easier to stomach from a writer of Smith’s talents were it not so prized, and so distressingly prevalent, in literary fiction on this side of the pond.

round 3 Dale Peck refuses to judge, finally coin toss gives it to Ali Smith.

zombie round Rosecrans Baldwin judges Jonathan Safran Foer vs. Ali Smith:
(If each book had a surrogate for its author embedded in the spine controlling things, Foer’s would be some teenage magician with expensive exploding cards; Smith’s would be a heavy gray brain nostalgic for its former body’s sex life. Both novels are so heavy in style, in-your-face about construction, so extremely deliberate and structurally didactic, Roth’s The Counterlife or, again, Sound & Fury, look subtle in comparison.) .. (Am I a sucker for realism, or do I simply hate being smacked by the scaffolding?)

Smith plays slow. How her sentences are built tells as much about her characters as what’s actually being said. This made the book richly satisfying, particularly because Smith is so handy with a reveal; it also exhausted me. Every chapter I skipped paragraphs, whole pages. me too. All the mental unraveling of a scene’s clues and references felt too much like I was stuck talking to that geekiest friend of mine who can reference a film, an anecdote, a piece of news trivia, and his girlfriend’s agility with parallel-parking all in the same review of a new album. Too much Christmas; too much figgy pudding; too many motifs and cues and CONTEXT-CURRENTLY-BEING-PROVIDEDs. But then, many times I loved (in a very relaxed, succumbed, “I-remember-why-I-love-reading” kind of way) Smith’s hand with surprise and dialogue. Her characters have their bodies filled in, and their shadows, too. I carried them around with me for a week.

It wasn’t an easy pick. I greatly enjoyed both books. To Faulkner again, though, Light in August is my favorite, not Sound and Fury; with Roth, The Ghost Writer, not Operation Shylock. I’m a sucker for being moved while reading, but not when I feel the author’s finger prodding me in the back.