When it comes to writing, you can talk about style, voice, form, theme, and much more in that vein, but in the end they all present themselves most immediately in the overall effect of the writing, and while there's a lot to be said about The Accidental, the strongest sensation with which I was left after finishing it was of that effect - which could perhaps be described as one of cryptic unresolvedness.
I was thinking about effect because I was trying to make sense of my response to the novel - and, in particular, why it reminded me so especially of Nicola Barker's work. Now, I've read two or three of Barker's books, a couple of years or so ago, I think, and I thought they were pretty good, but they didn't leave any particular impression on me and I don't recall finding them very satisfying (though obviously there was enough going on there for me to recur to her once or twice). Anyway, my point is that, whatever her merits as a writer, Barker's an unlikely reference point for me - but there it is, because it was of her that I thought immediately upon beginning to digest The Accidental. I don't know why.
There's a lot that I don't get about The Accidental, really. The two most striking things about the novel are its voice(s) and its structure/form, and, after a bit of thought, I've decided - at least for the time being - that both function, to overschematise a bit, in a tri-layered fashion:
1. Initially, the effect is disorienting - because the reader is deprived of a stable narrator, linear narrative, etc.
2. The disorientation doesn't last long; indeed, for anyone who reads a reasonable amount of contemporary lit fic, said disorientation is probably more theoretical than real, in part because we're so accustomed to the deployment of these kinds of textual strategies, and in part because Smith has the knack of using them in a way which seems quite transparent and doesn't cause the reader to bog down.
3. But this appearance of transparency-amidst-obscurity itself conceals a further obscurity which has little to do with the unconventional voice/structure, etc (at least in any direct sense). And it's that 'further obscurity' which lies at the heart of Smith's novel and which gives it that sense of unresolvedness and ungraspability (and not in any particular way the text's playing with form, narrative and all that).
I'm not sure if I liked it. No, I definitely liked it. I'm not sure what it's about. But it's definitely about western society today and its failures, absences and discontents. It's readable, provocative, subtle and human - four characteristics which aren't to be found in a single novel all that often. It doesn't seem to provide any easy 'outs' or neat resolutions, but I couldn't help wondering whether that 'seeming' didn't conceal - or allow, or authorise, or legitimise, or something - some implicit moves with which I wasn't entirely comfortable (in particular, Michael seems to get off too easily, and maybe Magnus too - but am I just being old-fashioned in: (a) my judgements of those characters; and (b) my desire to see them receive their moral 'just deserts' based on those judgements?). The Amber/Alhambra 'character' and general figure/subject, especially at start and end, feels underdeveloped - but again, I wonder if I'm just applying the 'wrong' kind of frame to my reading of it.
Hunh (to be read as: "slightly disgruntled exhalation").
