The story is of a dysfunctional London family in summer residence in a rural town in Norfolk, with sections alternately told from the minds of an adult couple, Michael and Eve, and their kids, twelve-year old Astrid and seventeen-year old Magnus. Astrid is largely ignored by her parents and lives in a vibrant fantasy life and projects involving documenting the world with her videocam. Magnus is in a horrible limbo of probation pending investigation of his role in internet bullying of a girl that led to her suicide. Eve is enjoying success as a writer of a series based on ordinary real people who died in World War 2, whom she renders in a fictional rewrite of the life they might had lived. Michael is a professor of Victorian literature, failed poet, and perpetual philanderer targeting his students. Spectacular . . . Allusive, ambitious and formally acrobatic . . . Original, restless, formally and morally challenging, [Ali Smith] remains a writer who resists definition." - The Times Literary Supplement. And what of that mysterious stranger? The enigmatic Amber arrives Chez Smart and moves in, yet no one in the family is quite up to admitting they have no idea who she is or how she found them. Her past feels irrelevant to the story, yet the stream-of-consciousness snippets indicate she was born in a movie theatre called Alhambra some three decades prior. She seems conjured out of legend, an imp, a sprite, beautiful and irreverent and frankly, rather mean-spirited and of questionable moral judgment. She drills under the skin of each family member, dragging them out of their emotional malaise and entrancing each before blowing the nuclear family to bits, figuratively speaking. Far be it from me, however, to give anything away. Astrid's mother, Eve, is supposed to be writing the next in her series of "Genuine Articles", books that relate the lives of people who died in the second world war, but then carry on as though they had lived - which enables Smith to make some nice jokes at the expense of the biography industry. Eve's husband, Michael, is a philandering university teacher of literature; her son Magnus, the least convincingly drawn person, thinks in mathematical terms and has done something terrible at school. What does The Accidental say about family life? In what ways are the Smarts both a typical and an atypical family?

The Accidental shows the rusted and broken bits inside the moral compass of the Smarts, a bourgeois British family of four on summer holiday in a drab northern England town. Eve Smart is mid-list novelist and mother of 17-year-old Magnus and 12-year-old Astrid. Michael Smart, husband and step-father, is a philandering professor of English. It becomes all to easy to detest the Smart mère et père, for they are eye-rollingly entitled and pretentious, but this novel is about the kids. And it is in their voices that Smith's prose shines like a beacon. The Accidental explores an interplay of fiction & reality— the Amber chapters/interstices are a clever play on the kind of Genuine series of books Eve Smart has built her reputation on: Shall I drop a hint? Think of Uncle Balt in The Tunnel. The entire Smart family & their experience is a fabrication of a character called Eve because the End gives a spin to everything that came before— Amber has morphed into Eve— a fictional character creating other fictional characters—talk about meta! The twist ending delivers a major po-mo punch.

READERS GUIDE

Like the musical notation with which the novel shares a name, the Buñuelian absurdity at the heart of The Accidental lifts the tale a step sharp from domestic realism (the discretions of the bourgeoisie indeed !). What's more, it demands that the reader make decisions." - Jessica Winter, The Village Voice The critic John Sutherland also comments on the novel's "remarkable narrative obliquity". [9] He notes also the intertextual and "intergeneric" nature of the book, the way in which it references the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1968 film Teorema in which, likewise, "a mysterious, beautiful stranger [...] arrives from nowhere into a family and, simply by virtue of what he is, destroys their merely 'theoretic' coherence". [9] Sutherland also stresses the ways in which Amber is "the offspring of cinema". [9] Reception [ edit ] It's difficult for any writer to pull off rotating viewpoints, but Smith does it perfectly, without a hint of clumsiness or tentativeness. (...) It's especially hard considering how disparate the characters are. (...) It pays to be suspicious of writers who tie things up too neatly, who end novels a little too perfectly. But Smith doesn't have this problem -- the last sentence of the book manages to be enlightening, confusing and almost destructive in its simple power. It doesn't tie things up; it almost unravels whatever ties the reader has invented while reading the book." - Michael Schaub, San Francisco Chronicle Words aren’t stable in Smith’s fiction: as in Shakespeare, everything is mutable. Illustration by Chloe Scheffe

The Accidental is playfully but also sensibly experimental, the different styles and approaches providing texture in a way that makes the story more real than a more straightforward rendering would have. A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.The questions the novel raises are persistent and profound. Why has Amber appeared among the Smarts? Was it an accident that she showed up at their door, or did they unconsciously summon her? Is her affect on them catastrophic or ultimately healing? What is it that holds families together, and what tears them apart? Why does Smith choose to end the novel with Eve’s journey to America? What is likely to happen in the future to the Smart family? About this Author

In describing her Genuine Articles, Eve Smart claims that “fiction has the unique power of revealing something true” [p. 82]. How is it that fiction can often deliver deeper truths than nonfiction? What truths does The Accidental reveal? Winner of the Whitbread Award for best novel and a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, The Accidental is the virtuoso new novel by the singularly gifted Ali Smith. Jonathan Safran Foer has called her writing “thrilling.” Jeanette Winterson has praised her for her “style, ideas, and punch.” Here, in a novel at once profound, playful, and exhilaratingly inventive, she transfixes us with a portrait of a family unraveled by a mysterious visitor. The family is staying in a rented cottage in Norfolk for the summer. Eva is not happy, as she feels the cottage is of a poor standard. Michael is not happy, not just because he has to commute to London for his job (and for his sex), but also because people just do not go to Norfolk any more, they go to Suffolk. Astrid is not happy, as there is nothing to do in the village. Derelict of parental and professional duty? Neither parent is engaged in their children's lives, to the children's detriment -- and both parents are engaged in unethical and legally questionable activities and in their respective work lives.British novelist and Booker Prize nominee Smith (Hotel World, 2001) renders acrobatic prose that seems in a perpetual state of acceleration .... mesmerizing." - Booklist.

I associate this happy, whimsical music, arch in places, with the sound of antique English children’s literature. Perhaps it’s odd to find this old, golden register in the work of a contemporary author, who grew up in a working-class family in the Highland town of Inverness, who is gay, and who often writes about gender, sexuality, and politics. But Smith’s capacious art warmly embraces variety, and creates eccentric stylistic families out of disparate inheritances: “English” whimsy sits easily enough alongside “Scottish” postmodernism; the realistic premises of conventional bourgeois fiction (families on holiday, unfaithful spouses, unhappy children, difficult parents) are regularly disrupted by surreal, experimental, or anarchic elements (time travel, ghosts, digressions, adaptations of late Shakespearean romances, and, in “Winter,” apparitions such as a floating head and a piece of landscape that hangs over a dining table, visible only to one of the characters). Sometimes you finish an Ali Smith book unsure about the final meaning of this variety show but certain that you have been in the presence of an artist who rarely sounds like anyone else. Having read four books by Ali Smith, I have had a strong sense that she may be secretly Roman Catholic, or was raised Catholic. The only thing I've been able to find out by online research is that she attended St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Primary School (Wikipedia). That would have been enough to form her moral conscience and sense of social justice for the poor in that distinctly Catholic way that I find expressed in so many subtle ways throughout her books (though her characters do not usually follow traditional Catholic sexual mores) -- and in the intriguing appearance of mysterious figures bringing grace or punishment or inspiration, setting captives free -- human characters, but on some level resembling angels, demons, or, in Spring, explicitly, Saint Brigid -- or a more ancient figure known as Saint Brigid in Christian times. Yet her novels that I have read are not speculative fiction; they are firmly set in the real world.This is a book for folks who have an appetite for literary experimentation. If you liked Ulysses, you will like this. If you like guessing where dialogue begins and thought ends, you will love this. As for me, I think that punctuation was invented for a reason. Call me pedestrian. I also like some literary experimentation, for example I loved Shadow Tag by Louise Erdich. But Erdich’s book drew me in inexorably and I watched in horror as a relationship imploded. It was a compelling and satisfying work and well worth putting the time into. This one was simply boring and annoying and it alienated me.