Twenty-first-century fiction

Contemporary British voices

Daniel Lea

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526108005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book offers readings of five of the most interesting and original voices to have emerged in Britain since the millennium as they tackle the challenges of portraying the new century. Through close readings of the work of Ali Smith, Andrew O'Hagan, Tom McCarthy, Sarah Hall and Jon McGregor, Daniel Lea opens a window onto the formal and thematic concerns that characterise a literary landscape troubled by both familiar and unfamiliar predicaments. These include questions about the meaning of humanness in an age of digital intercourse; about the need for a return to authenticity in the wake of postmodernism; and about the dislocation of self from the other under neoliberal individualism. By relating its readings of these authors to the wider shifts in contemporary literary criticism, this book offers in-depth analysis of important landmarks of recent fiction and an introduction to the challenges of understanding the literature of our time.

1

Ali Smith

If one were to describe the writing of Ali Smith in a word, it would probably be ‘but’. Though this might seem an inelegant and reductive way of summing up the playfully carnivalesque work of Smith, the contingency of ‘but’ encapsulates a stand-out quality of her fiction that might be termed ‘conjunctional’. Smith’s novels and short stories are always concerned with the pivots that balance alternative perspectives and worldviews, and gain their richness from the divergence from singularity that is implied by ‘but-ness’. If what precedes the ‘but’ is a forceful statement of subjective point of view, that which succeeds it brings depth and polyvocality and, crucially for Smith, opens up the creative possibilities of ambiguity. As one of the main characters in her 2011 novel There But For The comments: ‘the thing I particularly like about the word “but” […] is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting’ (Smith, 2012a: 175).¹ Being taken off to the side, detoured, disoriented, or derailed are adventures to which the reader of Smith must get accustomed, for her style, though often directly personal in its address, is characterised by a quirky roundaboutness that demands a continuous openness to others’ ways of seeing the world. That those ways often embrace the voices of children, outsiders, the dead, or inanimate objects points us back to the liminality of the ‘but’, which sits between, conjoining disparate stories and forging difference into a grammatical coherence. As the title of one of her collections of stories suggests, our narratives are always, and never, whole.

Smith’s first collection of stories, Free Love, was published in 1995, and, over the course of three further collections (Other Stories and Other Stories [1999], The Whole Story and Other Stories [2003], and The First Person and Other Stories [2008]) and six novels (Like [1997], Hotel World [2001], The Accidental [2005], Girl Meets Boy [2007], There But For The [2011], and How To Be Both [2014]), she has established a reputation for narratives of wit, perception, and vocal virtuosity. Stylistically her writing embraces fragmentation and multi-perspectivalism to reflect the crumbling of singular, authoritarian voices in contemporary discourses. Her narratives are filled with contrasting points of view, invoked in a restless marriage of difference and competitiveness, each seeking the privilege of primacy. These voices explain the world as it appears to them, but none are allowed the satisfaction of authoring the truths of others’ experience. Instead Smith relishes the argumentative grist of another’s perspective, queering the singular with the plural. Her novels and many of her stories tend to be constructed as duologues or multilogues, with characters’ differing versions of the world built around shared events or experiences. The real point of interest is not the victory of one voice, though that is often how her characters understand it, but the profusion of various registers, paroles, tones, vocabularies, accents, and pitches that feed into the ambiguity inherent in speech and communication.

The ways in which human beings fail, or refuse, to understand the other have been a consistent concern of Smith, but undercutting this antagonism is the recognition that such difference is the grounding for positive human experiences such as love, empathy, and duty. Limitation and liberation are conjoined in Smith’s writing, as is evident in narratives which sweep from the sublime to the banal, the bombastic to the bathetic, and the formal to the ludic. Smith’s writing is thus characterised by that balance that I am calling ‘conjunctional’; her narratives are often heartbreakingly tender in their treatment of loving relationships and yet frank in their acknowledgement of the losses that intimacy brings with it. Equally, they are resonant with a melancholic pain at the lost potential of unlived opportunities, but rambunctiously chaotic and untrammelled in their optimism and invention. In short, there are always at least two sides to any Ali Smith story.

Given that Smith is a writer that situates polyvocality at the heart of her politics and aesthetic, and one that critiques the lifelessness of contemporary literary theory, it is ironic that the academic response to her work has chosen to interpellate her through critical tropes that emphasise her discursive limits. To critics, she is notable largely for her lesbianism, her feminism, and her Scottishness, all tried and trusted anchors for current identity debates and yet all equally limiting to readings of Smith’s work, which stand outside the politics of otherness. Her nationality is a case in point. A significant portion of writing about her work has so far been published in anthologies of essays and criticism of Scottish writing (Germanà, 2012; Lumsden, 2000; Murray, 2006; Williams, 2006), which not only identifies her explicitly with her national concerns but also privileges a particular kind of reading of her politics. Smith is frequently bracketed with those who espouse the kind of Scottish identity that loudly asserts its opposition to Englishness and metropolitanism, and yet her fiction sits uncomfortably within such a frame. Whilst Scotland features as a geographical setting in a number of her novels and stories, it is rarely the direct subject of her writing, nor the political driver for her poetic vision. Smith’s wrestling with the human consequences of otherness thus becomes overshadowed by her own otherness in a way that hinders consideration of the significance of her voice within contemporary writing.

The short stories

Smith’s stories display an acute awareness of the pain of individual loneliness and the cost that is involved in combatting that existential emptiness by placing other people and other things in our lives. From Free Love onwards, she has portrayed the emotional and moral difficulties of connecting with an other and has repeatedly emphasised the fragility of understanding that overshadows even the strongest and most intimate of human bonds. The voices that emerge from her stories are often conflicted, fearful, melancholic, and in thrall to the hurtful memories that have defined and limited them. Yet, at the same time, these voices are also often hopeful, daring, altruistic, and open to the possibilities of transformation that being touched by the other can bring. Finding momentary common ground with a would-be combatant, or sharing the unspeakable sadness of another’s life through wordless physical contact, infuses Smith’s stories with a humane acceptance of life’s trials and guarantees the existence of meaningful depth. Smith’s vision is thus precariously balanced between pessimism and optimism: pessimistic that the price of being in the world will be too high, but optimistic that the moments of transcendent connection and empathy will compensate for the erosive action of subjectivity. Like her longer fiction, some of the stories critique the nature of individualism in a contemporary world where intimacy has given way to solipsism, but often they address more universal concerns with love and its failure, death, the search for meaning, the human compulsion to tell stories, and – encompassing all of these – the problems of connecting with other human beings.

This issue is both a thematic and formal one for Smith, as she regards the short story as a quintessentially dramatic form that reveals the synaptic flash of connection in its structural demands. In an interview on the short story with her friend Kasia Boddy, she repeatedly emphasises brevity as a moral component of the form, stressing that short fiction creates an interrogative space between connection and disconnection both in its structure and its expectation of characters:

there is always an answering back and that answering back is really exciting. […] Dialogue is absolutely life. The whole of life happens in dialogue. […] And response is the place at which we get to be our most human and playful. […] When you’ve got two minds engaged, they open up whole worlds, incredibly vast new worlds, and beyond that, there’s a multilogue as well which is that the worlds in themselves start to connect. (Boddy and Smith, 2010: 73)

Smith’s point is that the minimalism of the short story allows for a pared-down emotional expression that always indicates the existence of convoluted and dialogic interchanges. The story never simply describes a narrative arc towards closure but is rather ‘always some kind of middle or beginning’ (Boddy and Smith, 2010: 68). This open-endedness works against the fixity of the novel’s characterisation by focusing on the transformative power of the evanescent and the epiphanic. Smith’s stories perform this receptiveness to reshaping through narratives where endings and beginnings are the same thing; where moments of connection in relationships are undermined by chasms in understanding; where generic or formal conventions are invoked only to be subverted; and where one’s perspective is challenged by the legitimacy of the non-speaking voice. This leads to narratives that celebrate the spaciousness of the universal at the same time that they nurture the uniqueness of the exceptional. Smith’s writing is largely domestic in setting, but the resonance of small actions across history, geography, culture, and politics is far from quotidian.

Free Love (1995)

Smith regards her first collection as the least cohesive of her career (Boddy and Smith, 2010: 68), yet many of the stories gravitate around ideas of connection. The title story, ‘Free Love’, establishes the tone by describing how a sexual encounter with an Amsterdam prostitute helps the young female protagonist beyond the awkward anxieties of teenage becoming, and similar chance collisions between worlds are presented repeatedly throughout the text. ‘A Quick One’ describes the ending of a brief sexual relationship; ‘Jenny Robertson Your Friend Is Not Coming’ details an uncomfortable evening spent with the friend of a friend when something more intimate was expected; and ‘The Unthinkable Happens to People Every Day’ offers another serendipitous fusion of childish innocence with adult jadedness. The story concerns a burnt-out TV producer’s journey to his home in Scotland and his chance encounter with a nine-year-old girl, who, by challenging him to throw a rock into a loch, reconnects him with the positive, compassionate part of his personality, which has become lost. These narrative vignettes focus the reader’s attention on the contingency of human interaction, but, in two of the most successful stories in the collection, ‘A Story of Folding and Unfolding’ and ‘Cold Iron’, Smith explores how such momentary encounters can expand to fill and determine a life.

‘A Story of Folding and Unfolding’ conveys the sum of a lifelong relationship and the desperation of loss through the metaphor of women’s underwear. Not long after the Second World War, a nosy electrician and his mate titillate themselves by looking through the lockers of female military personnel, commenting salaciously on the condition of the underwear they find. The final locker contains garments that are ‘smooth, arranged and unrumpled, folded with talent’ (Smith, 1995: 16), ordered by a name that the electrician memorises, and a person he subsequently marries. Years later, he sits on his marital bed surrounded by his late wife’s unfolded underwear helplessly asking ‘What am I supposed to do with all of this?’ (Smith, 1995: 14). This oblique account of love tolled through the forging of a shared intimacy works both with and against the moments of snatched enlightenment present in other stories. The delicacy of love built over time and its precariousness are contrasted with the less significant encounters, but these moments of connection are not denigrated by comparison; rather they represent in crystalline fledgling form the possibility of a love that might sustain.

‘Cold Iron’ is a comparable story of grief, but that experienced at the loss of a parent. It explores how the last days and hours of dying fuse the momentous and the prosaic into an interpretational dissonance as the narrator seeks to come to terms with the various disconnections that her mother’s death represents. Throughout there is an iteration of the distance between the narrator and her dying mother – physical in the sense that she is parted from her at the end, emotional as she struggles to place her mother’s life into order and context – and a sense of the vulnerability of life. Like ‘A Story of Folding and Unfolding’ and ‘The Book Club’ in The Whole Story and Other Stories, which also deals with the loss of a parent, the story portrays the sturdiness of the material world in comparison with the fragility of human memory and experience, but, as with the balance between momentary and lifelong relationships, there is a distinct lack of judgement about the relative values of the physical and emotional. Instead the story balances the banal and revelatory properties of the domestic. The everyday world of things is not in opposition to the subject but rather contains a capacity for transcendence that can illuminate the inner experience and ground consciousness in the concrete. The final image of the story is thus one of contrasting despair and hope: ‘Myself I’m hanging on, leaning on the rail that overlooks the sea on either side of me, I’m picking up bits and pieces for my house. I’m thinking it out, I’m working out the story’ (Smith, 1995: 85).

Other Stories and Other Stories (1999)

Though less intensively than the later collections, Free Love explores the mystery of how relationships happen, the angles at which people’s lives connect, and how those collisions develop (or fail to develop) into something more meaningful. Smith is no heady romantic; her conviction in a transformative love accepts the innumerable tiny setbacks, irritations, niggles, and fractures that characterise love as an organic and lived experience with seasons of growth and recession. But, out of all these fluctuations, something can develop which blends difference and sameness, habit and spontaneity, conjunction and fragmentation into a profound connection that can only be described as humane. Consider, for instance, a story such as ‘The Theme is Power’ from Other Stories and Other Stories, which concentrates on personal catastrophes narrowly avoided, played out against a backdrop of global tragedies unavoided. The narrator’s decision as an adolescent not to be solicited by a friendly but potentially dangerous stranger is set against the failures of moral judgement on a strategic level that have led to war and death on a grand scale. The personal and the political fuse to create a deep sense of insecurity about the luck of living in a bubble of peace and protection, but the story concludes with a statement of commonality that goes some – but not all the – way to counteract the instability of living:

Under the covers you take my hand and turn it around, put your fingers through mine, interlocked, and you fall asleep like that, holding my hand. That’s all it takes. One glance, one sidelong blow from you, and a rock as big as a room explodes into little bits of gravel. […] I lie in our unpaid bed and trust you, carelessly, precariously, with my whole heart. (Smith, 2004: 136–137)

There is a sincerity here that prevents Smith’s prose from sliding into sentimentality; the smallness of a gesture of harmony amongst the chaos of uncontrollable events affirms the power of intimate connection, but ‘precariously’ identifies its contingency. The world cannot be made safe, Smith implies, but shared moments of tenderness and compassion can temporarily make us believe in the possibility.

Perhaps more than any of the other collections, Other Stories worries about the fragility of the individual in a toxic world of disconnection and misrecognition, where relationships are exploitative, care is perfunctory, and there is always so much more to be known. One of Smith’s domestic invasion stories, ‘Small Deaths’, literally engages with the idea of toxicity as an infestation of insects is eradicated by a chemical repellent horribly destructive to human health, whilst another, ‘The Hanging Girl’, addresses the desensitisation to pain within contemporary representation – a topic to which Smith would return in There But For The and How To Be Both. ‘Okay So Far’ is a more subtle story that balances ignorance of the lives of others with a crushing sense of the tenuousness of our connections to our selves. It is another story where a chance encounter opens up emotional anxieties that have been silenced for years as two women travelling across North America grow concerned about the safety of a young child seemingly travelling alone. The child is translated in their eyes into a metaphor for their own vulnerability: they are far from home and see in her aloneness the miracle of their survival into adulthood. Later, the narrator relates for the first time a story of her own childhood in which she narrowly escaped injury, emphasising not only the fragility of life but also the persistence of childhood within the adult body. The body does not outgrow the past, Smith claims, but always contains a childhood kernel of unmanageable anxiety that is dampened rather than forgotten by time. The recognition of her own helplessness propels the narrator into a form of loneliness that is resolved only by the sharing of her partner’s comparable fear of the world. As they lie curled protectively in each other’s arms, the narrator wonders how they ‘have come so far. It frightens me to think how far we have come and how fast we’ve gone, how little we’ve noticed of it’ (Smith, 2004: 103). This is a statement of resilience and survivorship, but it is also a recognition of how easily that ballast can be eroded; after all, as the story’s title indicates, the characters are only okay so far.

‘Okay So Far’ is like many of the stories in Other Stories in that it identifies storytelling as a means of recuperating the self through another’s narrative. However the volume also contains a number of stories where the subject of connection is addressed through the opposition of differing accounts. One such is ‘More than One Story’, which details the perspectives of an older man and an eighteen-year-old girl. The protagoni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: contemporary criticism and the untimely
• 1 Ali Smith
• 2 Andrew O’Hagan
• 3 Tom McCarthy
• 4 Sarah Hall
• 5 Jon McGregor
• Select bibliography
• Index