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*****
The Accidental By Ali Smith PENGUIN pounds 7.99
Take a bourgeois English family - say, a writer, a university lecturer, and their two children, 12 and 17 - seclude them in their holiday let for the summer, then introduce a mysterious, provocative antagonist into their midst and watch as their complacent routine and smug assumptions are exposed, then shattered. You've got yourself the basis of an archetypal middle-class novel which deals in all the usual anxieties but will still leave you feeling superior. Alternatively, give the same set-up to Ali Smith and get yourself an effervescent, inventive and unique novel, which deals in uncanny emotions in a playful way, and leaves you invigorated, stirred and a little bewildered.
If you're feeling ungenerous or if you find Smith's many syntactic idiosyncrasies, her peculiar digressions and pronouncements on the usually unnoticed ephemera of existence, eventually become tiresome, then you might say that Smith is a bit too in love with the sound of her own voice. I prefer to allow that she's in love with her characters' voices' that she hears them loud and vivacious in her head and does well to get them on paper with so much unmediated vitality, so that we might, too. If it means that she has to use language anew, I'm happy to let her make her own rules. The sentence "the stuff growing in the field was jabby on Astrid's legs", for example, explains the feeling of walking through a field when you're a serious-minded 12-year-old girl unused to the countryside so aptly, it's hard to believe no one's needed the word jabby before.
*****
Sightseeing By Rattawut Lapcharoensap ATLANTIC pounds 7.99
Rattawut Lapcharoensap's very fine first collection of stories transports us to Thailand's exotic climes, but doesn't let us relax. In "Farangs" (literally: Caucasians, but more colloquially: bloody foreigners) we're made to see ourselves through the eyes of a hotelier, as thick-tongued, pasty-skinned, uncultured and ignorant. Her half-white teenage son, though, infatuated with American culture in general, and with the latest unobtainable girl in a Budweiser bikini in particular, has a more ambiguous attitude. So too, the boy in "At the Caf Lovely", whose factory-worker father was crushed to death by a crate of toys he'd helped...