There but for the
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15
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Imagine you give a dinner party and a friend of a friend brings a stranger to your house as his guest. He seems pleasant enough. Imagine that this stranger goes upstairs halfway through the dinner party and locks himself in one of your bedrooms and won't come out. Imagine you can't move him for days, weeks, months. If ever.
Ali Smith's dazzling new novel is a funny, moving book about time, memory, thought, presence, quietness in a noisy time, and the importance of hearing ourselves think.
--back cover
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I have two things to say, and one passage to quote.
1) The character of Brooke was almost as good as a kid in a Salinger story.
2) Why why why the giant 16 pt font and non-justified paragraphs? This book was a short novel disguised as a literary doorstop.
Your mother and I were having an intellectual discussion last night about turn-of-the-century manhood, her father said. It was because your father was annoyed that I was watching a film called Ronin on TV and that I wouldn't put it off and come to bed, her mother said. It was because your mother said that being blown through the wall by an action hero or, in this case, stalked within a hair's breadth of your life around a dark parking lot by a man with a gun, was so exciting that she couldn't come to bed till the film was finished, and when I said that I would tell all her students and work colleagues and employers that she prefers, as examples of turn-of-the-century manhood, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Al Pacino to Proust's Swann and Joyce's Bloom, she got quite violent with me and even started hitting me quite hard in the chest area, her father said. If only you were a real man, her mother said, and Schwarzenegger isn't even in Ronin. Yes, but he's big in A La Recherche, her father said, and one can only thank the great writers for giving us such good role models. Sylvester Swann. Leopold Schwarzenegger. Robert de Bloom. Both her parents were laughing. Brooke looked up from her piece of paper and watched them throwing the words for birds and flowers and Hollywood actors at each other like they were throwing little rocks wrapped as presents. She looked round the room at all the books on all the shelves. A closed book on a shelf sat their quietly, not saying anything. Her mother was shouting about Wesley Snipes. Her father was holding up his hands and laughing. Do you two want to know a really good joke? Brooke said. Go on then, her father said still looking at her mother with love. Yes, her mother said still looking with the same pleasedness at her father. Then they both turned at once and looked at Brooke. Okay, Brooke said.
