There but for the by Ali Smith
My rating: 3/5 cats
i did this book a great disservice.
at first, i plowed through it like a maniac, loving every minute of it. then, i put it down for about two days and totally lost my momentum, and when i returned, the shine was off the apple.
completely my fault.
it has been nearly a week since i have written a book review, and this feels like a less-than-triumphant return, but it is fitting – i need to be punished for my weekend hedonism and non-book-reading self. for shame!
allow me the indulgence of an extended quote, because it is something i really liked and it reminded me, thematically at least, of infinite jest:
He thinks about the couple of times he’s brought himself off by watching the free porn on the net: two men on the steps of a blue swimming pool, three men dressed as soldiers in a toilet. Both times he had to go in search of something else on there afterwards to make himself feel less degraded. The second time he had simply typed something beautiful into the google images box. Up came a picture of some leaves against the sun. A picture of a blonde photoshop-smooth woman and baby sleeping. A picture of a bird. A picture of Mother Teresa. A picture of a modernist building made of shiny metal. A picture of two people sticking knives into their own hands. Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google. He surveys the strewn table. Sure, there’s a certain charm to being able to look up and watch Eartha Kitt singing Old Fashioned Millionaire in 1957 at three in the morning or Hayley Mills singing a song about femininity from an old Disney film. But the charm is a kind of deception about a whole new way of feeling lonely, a semblance of plenitude but really a new level of Dante’s inferno, a zombie-filled cemetery of spurious clues, beauty, pathos, pain, the faces of puppies, women and men from all over the world tied up and wanked over in site after site, a greater sea of hidden shallows. More and more, the pressing human dilemma: how to walk a clean path between obscenities.
i truly loved the first two-thirds of this book. the dinner party is such a hilarious, uncomfortable, frustrating thing to endure, even only as a reader of it – i never never want to go to a dinner party that is actually like that. they are the worst collection of human beings ever. most of them.
and the part that covers anna and milo’s first meeting is tender and beautiful and memorable, and i fell in love with both of them completely.
but the problem with putting this book down is that the narrative perspective changes and any pause is going to ruin the flow, much less a two-day pause with a bleary-eyed foggy return, where you are immersed in a whole new POV and wondering where all your character-friends have gone, and then wondering where you lost an earring in your travels…
it should have a higher rating from me, really, just for the character of brooke – the only hyper-hyper-precocious child character i have ever liked. the book is worth reading just for her interactions with her parents. the fact that i never wanted to throttle her proves smith’s skill as a writer.
but – alas – i was a terrible reader of this book. i give the first 2/3 of the book 5 stars cats, and i give myself 1 star cat, and that averages out to three stars cats.
will do better tomorrow.
