While her characters fumble forward, in and out of embraces and confrontations, in a semblance of real time, the author composes an experiment that enacts writing through time in an unconventional way. Steeped in the moods and apprehensions that headlines - migrant crises, immigration, climate change, Brexit, political corruption, COVID-19, Black Lives Matter - mark but do not adequately measure, Smith’s quartet is, at the same time, bracing, exhilarating, disorienting, and instructive diverting, too, with a cast of misfit characters struggling to find a way to fit in an increasingly unfittable world. Which brings Smith’s readers back, in the echoing of rhythm and memory, to the first line of Autumn : “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.” An appropriate enough invocation of the muse for a purposefully timely novel set in the year of 2016.Īutumn was the first volume of Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, the final installment of which, Summer, was published several months ago, concluding an ambitious, quixotic, angry, warmhearted, anxious, funny, generous project, provoked by the shredding of the social and political fabrics in both Britain and America in the times it encompasses: the four years in which the novels were being composed. Who needs a passport? Who am I? Where am I? What am I? I’m reading. They’d made everything happening stand just far enough away. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us. She’d started to read from the beginning, quite quietly, out loud.
She’d brought the chair from the corridor. He is asleep, or drifting in and out of the past and present of nearly a hundred years of dreams. David Hockney paintings on the cover of the UK editions of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet.Ībout three-quarters of the way through Ali Smith’s novel, Autumn, a young woman named Elisabeth pulls a chair up to the bedside of an elderly former neighbor whom she is visiting in a care home.
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