The First Person

It’s not long into any discussion of Ali Smith’s work before the British author is hung with the label “experimental,” which can—in certain circles—connote other nasty adjectives like “cold,” “difficult,” and “okay if you’re still in college.” But Smith’s writing is just the opposite: Though it detours through some less-trodden paths, it’s as breezy and lively as any book of—for lack of a better term—traditional fiction.

But even if we take the label at its more literal root, we’d have to say it’s misapplied. Smith doesn’t experiment; she’s not testing the waters. She’s striding in with the other side in sight. Much of The First Person concerns two people fumbling through relationships. In the title story, which closes out the book, it’s an older woman and her younger lover, playfully arguing about the relevancy and depth of their union. It’s a happy love story, the most difficult to write, no doubt, and Smith plumbs her narrator’s reluctance to actually believe in a happy relationship for both comic and dramatic effect: “You’re not the first person to squeeze whatever love juice it is you’ve squeezed into my eyes to make me see things so differently, I say.” It’s that blend of the cute and the honest that makes Smith’s humor so appealing.

In the opener “True Short Story,” for instance, Smith begins by recounting a story of overhearing two men in a café, comparing the novel to a “flabby old whore,” and the short story to “a nimble goddess…still in very good shape.” The narrator consults her friend Kasia—a lover of short fiction—to get her opinion on the matter, which leads to a discussion of Kasia’s battle with breast cancer, and ends with an incantation of famous writers’ categorization of the short story form, which Smith nimbly folds back into Kasia’s story. Smith wasn’t trying the bounds of the short story; she knew exactly where they were because she’d carefully set them up.

And this is the book’s greatest difficulty: Smith’s mischief comes across as too premeditated. Even in “The Child,” where a mysterious baby appears in the narrator’s grocery cart, stakes a claim to her as his mother and begins spouting bounties of bigotry, the whole thing is so neatly sewn together, it possesses only the veneer of invention. Nothing is too surprising, the stories’ logic is never challenged. In other words, there’s no reason to fear, this is as comfortable and familiar as “experimental” fiction gets.

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