Autumnby Ali Smith
Rating: ★★★½
Series: Seasonal Quartet #1
Publication Date: October 20, 2016
Genre: fiction
Pages: 264
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women, booker prize
Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That's what it felt like for Keats in 1819.
How about Autumn 2016?
Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer.
Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.
Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. This first in a seasonal quartet casts an eye over our own time. Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearian jeu d'esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s Pop art: the centuries cast their eyes over our own history-making.
Here's where we're living. Here's time at its most contemporaneous and its most cyclic.
From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves.
For many years, from the time that I was probably 18 until about 20 years ago, when I was just shy of 40, I read tons of literary fiction – my reading was split pretty evenly between literary fiction and mysteries. In my late 30’s, though, I went on a romance reading binge that lasted for two or three years, and at that point I essentially quit reading contemporary lit fic and have read almost exclusively genre fiction and/or classic/vintage fiction since then. The romance phase was short lived, but the anti-lit-fic phase had staying power.
I can’t exactly say why, but if I had to speculate it is because I grew weary of the great literary fiction theme of late-middle aged men and their obsession with their waning virility.
However, somewhat strangely, I’ve found myself drawn back in the direction of literary fiction – especially literary fiction by women (I am still impatient with literary fiction by men). I picked up Autumn both because I needed a book for 2016, but more importantly because I have a bookish friend who really loves Ali Smith. She is probably a big deal in England, but I had never heard of her.
It’s strange, but in a good way. It’s quite stream of consciousness, and can be difficult to follow. The frame of the story is, basically, a young woman named Elisabeth and her friendship with her very elderly neighbor, Daniel Gluck. Daniel is (now) a centenarian, and is in a coma. Elisabeth is visiting him in the hospital. Within this frame we have Daniel’s memories of his life, Elisabeth’s memories of Daniel, and digressions into Pauline Boty, a British painter and founder of the British pop art movement in the 1960’s, Christine Keeler and the Profumo scandal, and how both of them impacted Daniel (directly) and Elisabeth (indirectly).
The time period of the book is immediately after the Brexit vote, which occurred on 6/23/2016, so there are references to that political conflict.
All across the country, people called each other cunts. All across the country, people felt unsafe. All across the country, people were laughing their heads off. All across the country, people felt legitimized. All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked. All across the country, people felt righteous. All across the country, people felt sick. All across the country, people said it wasn’t that they didn’t like immigrants. All across the country, people said it was about control. All across the country, everything changed overnight. All across the country, the haves and the have nots stayed the same. All across the country, the usual tiny per cent of the people made their money out of the usual huge per cent of the people. All across the country, money money money money. All across the country, no money no money no money no money.
Sounds exactly like the first (and second) election of Donald Trump.
Autumn is the first book in Smith’s “Seasonal Quartet.” My TBR list is so absurdly long that I cannot even begin to speculate when, or even if, I will get to Winter, Spring and/or Summer.