There But For The by Ali Smith – Review & Giveaway (Closed)

There But For The
by Ali Smith
Publisher: Pantheon
Publication Date: September 13, 2011
ISBN: 9780375424090
256 Pages
Fiction

Publisher’s Description:

At a dinner party in the posh London suburb of Greenwich, Miles Garth suddenly leaves the table midway through the meal, locks himself in an upstairs room, and refuses to leave. An eclectic group of neighbors and friends slowly gathers around the house, and Miles’s story is told from the points of view of four of them: Anna, a woman in her forties; Mark, a man in his sixties; May, a woman in her eighties; and a ten-year-old named Brooke. The thing is, none of these people knows Miles more than slightly. How much is it possible for us to know about a stranger? And what are the consequences of even the most casual, fleeting moments we share every day with one another?

My Opinion:

There But For The is such an odd yet intriguing book. It contains the stories of four people (Anna, Mark, May and Brooke) told in what is really four related short stories. At the core of each person’s story is Miles.

Miles is a dinner guest who leaves the table in the middle of the meal and locks himself in the spare room of the house. He has no real acquaintance with the dinner hosts, and no one knows why he has locked himself in.

The details about the dinner and the events leading up to it are revealed throughout the four stories, as well as the many ways in which Miles has touched the lives of those around him.

In some ways I was dissatisfied with the ending because I wanted to know more about Miles; about why he locked himself in the room. In other ways I was pleased and impressed with the writing. I loved how the author used the intro word from each section as a recurring theme within that particular part of the story. It was very creative and didn’t feel forced or overly manipulated at all. The experience to me was like that of viewing a piece of modern art and actually understanding what the artist was trying to do with it.

This is very much a book of literary fiction, with the inclusion of some poetry in the text and stream-of-consciousness writing. The author doesn’t use quotation marks to separate conversation from other parts of the text, which usually would annoy me, but I barely noticed it in this story.

Here’s a sample of the writing to give you an idea of the style and wit:

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. . . 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 . . . More and more, the pressing human dilemma: how to walk a clean path between obscenities.  Pages 105-106

I recommend this book to those who like literary fiction that is artfully written. Readers should be aware that some of the story contains sexual scenes and graphic language.

Rating: 4/5

I received a free copy of this book for review.

Giveaway Information: (Closed)

Thanks to the publisher I have two extra hardcover copies of There But For The to give away.

Entries are open to those from the US only (18 and over).

The deadline for entry is 11:59 pm (Pacific) October 23, 2011.

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