The Accidental: A novel (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Before writing The Accidental, Ali Smith wrote Hotel World, shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize, and several short story collections. Her work is absolutely original, with a trademark quirky style, with whole passages that seem to have been bound into the wrong book and occasional historical asides completely outside the narrative line. Don't be fooled; with Smith, every word has a purpose.

Amber is the catalyst who makes the novel happen. She appears on the doorstep of the Smart's rented summer cottage in Norfolk, England, barefoot and unexpected. Eve Smart, a third-rate author suffering writer's block, believes that she is a friend of her husband's. Michael is a womanizing University professor, but he doesn't usually drag his quarry home. He thinks that she must be a friend of Eve's. Everyone is politely confused and Amber is invited to dinner. She is a consummate liar and manipulator who manages to seduce everyone in the family in some significant way.

Magnus, Eve's 17-year-old son from a former marriage and Astrid, her 12-year-old daughter, are easy prey. Magnus is in despair. He played a prank on a classmate and it went horribly wrong when she killed herself because of the humiliation it caused. He cannot shake the guilt and is about to hang himself from the shower rod when Amber walks into the bathroom, the perfect deus ex machina. She bathes him and takes him back downstairs, announcing that she found him trying to kill himself. Everyone titters. Could it be possible? This is a recurring question as Amber's behavior becomes more and more outrageous. Is this really happening, or is it some family-wide delusion? To add to the mystery, there is a Rashomon-like character to the story in that the same events are recalled by the Smarts through their own filters.

This life force who is Amber is finally thwarted when Eve, after a disturbing event, compels her to leave. The family is left to re-evaluate who they are post-Amber and to decide how to live with the changes she has brought about in them through this "accidental" encounter. This is a completely engrossing novel that raises as many questions as it answers. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. While the Smarts are a happy, prosperous British family on the surface, underneath they are as friable as a Balkan republic. Eve suffers from a block about writing yet another of her popular Genuine Article books (a series of imaginary reconstructions of obscure, actual figures from the past). Michael, her English professor husband, is a philanderer whose sexual predation on his students has reached critical mass. Teenaged Magnus, Eve's son by first husband Adam, is consumed by guilt around a particularly heinous school prank. And Astrid, Eve and Adam's daughter, is a 12-year- old channeling the angst of a girl three years older. Into this family drops one Amber MacDonald, a mysterious stranger who embeds herself in the family's summer rental in Norfolk and puts them all under her bullying spell. By some collective hallucination—one into which Smith (Hotel World) utterly and completely draws the reader—each Smart sees Amber as a savior, even as she violates their codes and instincts. So sure-handed are Smith's overlapping descriptions of the same events from different viewpoints that her simple, disquieting story lifts into brilliance. When Eve finally breaks the spell and kicks Amber out, it precipitates a series of long overdue jolts that destroys the family's fraught equilibrium, but the shock of Smith's facility remains. (Jan.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; Unabridged edition (January 10, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375422250
• ISBN-13: 978-0375422256
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #609,770 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Five stories for the price of one, January 19, 2006

By	K. L. Cotugno (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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There are so many pleasures to be found in this skillfully crafted book. Whether it is the characters' names, their hidden perceptions, the setup, or the interior monologue of the catalyctic Amber, the only story told in first person. Initially, the four "Smarts" are so wrapped up in their individual dramas, that they barely intersect. Many issues of the day are addressed, some of which don't become apparent until after the book has been closed. The reader keeps returning to passages, wondering how this or that was missed the first time around, but realizing that until the entire picture has been presented, it would be impossible to isolate a revelation. To say more would ruin new readers' experience of taking this journey for themselves. It provided more fun than I've had in a long time with a book.

32 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A New View , January 18, 2006

By	Eric Anderson (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Surprise and chance have a way of intrusively wedging a new perspective into people's lives. The four members of the Smart family seem in particular need of just such an unexpected element during their holiday in the Norfolk countryside. All of them are on the brink of a major crisis in their lives, but most of them are carefully avoiding the reality of their situations. At their idyllic getaway which the daughter Astrid views as an "unhygienic dump" they receive an unexpected visitor who brashly delivers a new point of view. From beginning, middle to end they are shaken into a new understanding of the world.

This is an intelligent, carefully structured novel that is both funny and illuminating. A chance trip to watch the movie Love Actually leads Magnus, the confused young son of the family to ruminate on Plato's ideas about Belief and Illusion. Ali Smith is able to incorporate myth and philosophy into her wry look at ordinary modern life in a way that produces an entirely fresh way of seeing. From the minute details of life to the war in Iraq playing in the background, the methods we use to understand things are exposed and questioned. Whether seeing reality through the filter of Astrid's camera lens or the mathematical equations of Magnus, the way we view the world is scrupulously examined. But the characters have a sense that truth is still hidden from them leading them to use new tools to examine it. Ali Smith bravely experiments with language and the form of the novel to re-view life. If her technique is viewed by some as placing literary panache over essential meaning then Smith seems to answer this through her character the novelist Eve who responds, "It's not a gimmick. Every question has an answer." Smith cleverly constructs different paths to bring us to new answers.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An engrossing and contemplative novel, January 24, 2006

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

Novelist Ali Smith's books (HOTEL WORLD, THE ACCIDENTAL) have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and it is certainly no mystery as to why. Her writing is fresh, her character development is thorough and refreshingly consistent, and her motivation for writing clearly is not to prove a point, to push an overarching authorial voice, or to flaunt her obvious talent, but simply to allow her characters to tell a good story. Winner of the 2005 Whitbread Book Award, THE ACCIDENTAL is such an engrossing and contemplative novel that you'll want to read it a second time in order to pick up what you might have missed the first go-round.

Although Smith's stream-of-consciousness writing style takes a bit of getting used to, it is inevitably the glue that holds this fascinating book together. Split into three sections (the beginning, the middle and the end), the story slowly and deftly unfolds as the perspective switches from character to character, narrator to narrator. What we are left with at the novel's conclusion is a patchworked, pieced-together glimpse into a broken down yet blazingly human family before, during and after the strange summer that permanently altered each member and changed their outlook on life (and each other) in mystifying ways.

Before "escaping" for a summer to a rented cottage in Norfolk, the Smarts (12-year-old Astrid, 17-year-old Magnus, and parents Eve and Michael) resemble a typical dysfunctional family. Astrid spends her days either walled up inside her imagination or behind a video camera filming other people's "far more interesting" lives. Magnus sequesters himself in his room, refusing to bathe, eat, or speak to his family after a school prank he masterminded results in a classmate's suicide. Michael sleeps with countless of his students at the university and ignores his family, and Eve halfheartedly whittles away at the writing block that is preventing her from beginning her next novel. Collectively, they are a pathetic sight to behold --- incommunicative, worn-out, and apathetic about each other and their future.

Enter Amber MacDonald, the barefoot and unshaven thirty-something year-old stranger, who appears one day out-of-the-blue at the cottage and stays long enough to make a few unexpected --- and frightfully lasting --- impressions on each of them.

Despite the fact that she isn't directly connected to the family (although each of them assumes she's a friend, lover or colleague of the other), Amber manages to worm her way into the Smarts' day-to-day routine.

"Amber is ruthless with Astrid. She is unbelievably rude to Michael. As if I give a monkey's f--- about what you think about books. She is bored silly by his mother, makes no attempt to hide it. Uh-huh. So: Astrid is besotted. Michael looks more determined every time. His mother gets keener to dredge up 'interesting' things to say. It is like a demonstration of magnetic gravity. It is like watching how the solar system works. As concerns Magnus himself, Amber = true. Amber = everything he didn't even know he imagined possible for himself."

Accidentally --- or quite on purpose --- her magnetic presence becomes a turning point for each of them and forces them to take control of their lives, presumably for the better.

In the end, Amber disappears from the scene (after being banished by Eve), and what follows in the last section (a plot twist; universal questions posed by each of the characters, including reflective musings on the nature of truth, the role of chance, and the importance of choice in life; and deliciously long and quiet yet immensely powerful sentences) is what makes the novel worth reading again and again. Indeed, Ali Smith's THE ACCIDENTAL is truly worthy of the praise it has garnered thus far and is the mark of a writer with a rare gift of divine expression and an acute insight into the frailty of human existence.


--- Reviewed by Alexis Burling