The Accidental: Ali Smith

[poliphilo]

It's almost a genre, but maybe not quite. A mysterious stranger comes to town and transforms every life he or she touches. Works in this almost-a-genre range from Mary Poppins to Brimstone and Treacle, from An Inspector Calls to Teorema. A number of westerns- including several Clint Eastwood westerns- qualify. In Smith's treatment of the theme the angel is an ageing hippie chick and the people she turns over are a middle-class family on holiday in Norfolk. I liked the 12 year old daughter best- Smith does a grand job of getting inside her head- and the womanizing husband least- she makes him awfully soft- and has him think in verse- which is something no novelist should ever attempt. You want to lose your readers? Try tossing them a sonnet.

Comments

[negothick.livejournal.com]

Folks, this is no genre: It's one of the ONLY TWO PLOTS of fiction: "A stranger comes to town" and "Someone leaves town." (Cory Doctorow played with this in his novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town).
Really: even long epics like Beowulf or The Aeneid are combinations of the two (Beowulf comes to town; later on, a Dragon comes to town, Beowulf leaves town).

[negothick.livejournal.com]

Of course, while Beowulf DOES improve and transform the lives of the Danes and cleans up Heorot, we can't say as much for the Dragon.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'll have to think about that. I suppose you could say that Pride and Prejudice is about Darcy coming to town and Great Expectations is about Magwitch coming to town.

But, if G.E., for example, were properly to conform to the pattern of the mysterious stranger narrative Magwitch would have to have a decisive effect on people other than Pip- and I don't think he does, not really.

Are you saying anything more than that every story involves people meeting other people?

[negothick.livejournal.com]

I'm just repeating a critical truism--of course it's reductionist, and it works better for shorter narratives--but it surely does work for folktale and myth--and most YA novels.