TANIA HERSHMAN REVIEWS ALI SMITH'S "THE FIRST PERSON AND OTHER STORIES*

CLR wishes you all a Merry Christmas and a Wonderful New Year and would like to thank everyone (especially the reviewers) who have made its first quarter a success.  We have great things lined up for 2010, so watch this space.

2009 has been dubbed in many quarters as "The Year of the Short Story". It is with this in mind that Critical Literature Review has decided to dedicate its final edition of the year (and indeed this decade) to a short story anthology. CLR proudly presents Tania Hershman's review of Ali Smith's short story collection "The First Person and Other Stories". Hope you enjoy reading it.

Ali Smith is one of my favourite authors. In fact, I believe she is why I began writing short stories, why I love them. And so, before I begin, I am going to take issue with the back cover of the book. The third quote, after wonderful praise from Alain de Botton and the Scotsman, is from the Daily Telegraph: "Smith has a talent for finding unexpected flashes of beauty and comedy in the everyday". The word I take issue with is "everyday" (is it one word?). Ali Smith never writes about the "everyday", whatever it is. Or, in as much as all writers who do not write fiction that takes place in other worlds, other planets, other dimensions, or stories about the truly abhorrent in society, perhaps everyone writes about the "everyday". But to me, this word demeans what Smith does so beautifully. 

Smith's stories are the epitome of the "What if...?" What if you were shopping and found a baby in your supermarket trolley? What if you were at an opera and a character from Gershwin arrived? What if a parcel addressed to someone else turns up when you are ill at home? None of these brief summaries does justice to what Smith does. She plays with the reader, twist and turn, lead you one way and then pull the rug from under you, quietly, gently. And leave you feeling winded, stunned, joyful.

This collection is called The First Person and Other Stories, where "the first person" might relate to the term in fiction which means that the story is being told by "I", and we are in the main character's head, or it may mean being the first person to.... and already Smith is teasing us. She includes four quotes at the beginning, including this from Katherine Mansfield: "True to oneself! Which self?" I take from this that Smith, who writes almost exclusively here in the first person, except for two stories, that she is hinting that all these selves are part of one self, and at the same time, we are not so easily defined, labelled, boxed in. We are not just one thing, we are many.

Smith has her own  take on "first person" point of view: not only is the story being told by "I", in many of the twelve stories "I" is talking to "you", which creates an intense intimacy, intensified by her lack of quotation marks and of names for her characters. They are particular and they are general at the same time. We are eavesdropping on that space between two people, often lovers or ex-lovers, it is as if we are standing between them and they are whispering to each other through us:

I don't know if I am up to this any more, I say.

Yawn, you say.

(You don't actually yawn, you say the word yawn. Then you look at me across the table and smile. I'm still unused to your smile, and to it being directed at me. Sometimes when you smile at me I have the urge to look over my shoulder and see who you are smiling at.)

There are those who object to the addressing of a story to "you" because the reader can feel put upon, can think "But I'm not saying yawn", etc... However, because there is an "I" talking to the "you", this doesn't happen here. We are the silent witness to their conversation.

Were I to try and outline the plots of some of these stories, this would be to fail miserably in conveying the magic of Smith's writing and so I won't. One thread I noticed running through these stories are questions of identity: if everyone treats you as the mother of the baby you just found in your supermarket trolley, do you feel like its mother? If your lover tells you her fantasy of what you would buy in a music shop, how does her view of you change your own view of yourself?

Smith also plays with the notion of "story": in one story we move from a set of characters and a scene to another, apparently unconnected set of characters elsewhere, often within the same paragraph, and we don't return, there is no neat tying up. But there is no sense of dissatisfaction, no yearning to find out what happened to that couple we met at the beginning. Smith's words weave a tale so that somehow we understand what is going on here, despite the leaps in location and time, despite the lack of traditional narrative.

Smith's first story doesn't seem to be fiction at all, but a story about short stories, which ends with a list of other writers' definitions of the short story. As with other collections I have reviewed, Smith is telling us what it means to her.

Alice Munro says that every short story is at least two stories.

Ernest Hemingway says that short stories are made by their own change and movement, and that even when a story seems static and you can't make out any movement in it at all it is probably changing and moving regardless, just unseen by you.

Walter Benjamin says that short stories are stronger than the real, lived moment, because they go on releasing the real, lived moment after the real, lived moment is dead.

William Carlos Williams says that the short story, which acts like the flare of a match struck in the dark, is the only real form for describing the briefness, the brokenness and the simultaneous wholeness of people's lives.

I could not describe Ali Smith's stories better myself so I won't attempt it. This is another beautiful, vital short story collection from one of the greatest short story writers alive today. If you write short stories, if you love to read them, this is a book that you need on your shelf. This is the flare of that match struck in the dark.

* This book review was first published in The Short Review.

[Tania Hershman (http://www.taniahershman.com/) is founder and editor of The Short Review (http://www.theshortreview.com/). Her collection, The White Road and Other Stories (http://www.thewhiteroadandotherstories.com/), is published by Salt Modern Fiction and was commended in the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers.]