Companion Piece by Ali Smith (2022): A Review
Author: Ali Smith
Publication Year: 2022
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Pages: 230
Source: book
Genre: literary fiction, COVID, Pandemic
Ali Smith’s Companion Piece (2022) is very much a COVID novel—but, being Ali Smith, it’s also absolutely not just a COVID novel. Our main character, Sandy Gray (Sand), is a kind of awkward, artsy nerd trying to deal with her father’s hospitalization right in the middle of the pandemic. So yes, there are masks and lockdowns and hospitals, but there’s also Smith doing what Smith does best: taking the narrative, twisting it into a Möbius strip, and then asking you to walk on it in the dark.
This is peak Smithian territory: strange timelines, slippery characters, and a narrator you’re never entirely sure you should trust. Here she pushes it even further—so far that you start wondering whether all of it actually happened. Did Sand really experience that bizarre intrusion of the past? Or is she just inventing stories to survive the suffocating loneliness of curfew? And that “crulew” (great word, by the way)—is it a genuine attempt to link the present pandemic to centuries‑old plague narratives, or just Sand’s brain doing somersaults after too much isolation and not enough fresh air?
What’s real, what’s hallucination, and does it even matter? Is the story an answer, or just another question wearing a different hat? If it is one long hallucination, is that maybe the whole point—that the only way to get through a global crisis without fully losing your mind is to let your imagination run slightly feral? I finished the book with far more questions than answers, but they were the good kind of questions.
Smith’s humor is always there in her work, but here it’s absolutely unhinged in the best way. The standout for me is the sequence where this utterly bizarre family (possibly another hallucination?) basically storms Sand’s life and her home, at the precise historical moment when we were all supposed to be disinfecting the groceries and side‑eyeing strangers on the pavement. Instead of “keeping their distance,” they practically move into her personal bubble, forcing her to flee her own space to feel safe. It’s so absurd it ends up feeling more accurate than a straight, realistic scene ever could.
There’s a lot more going on in this novel—ideas about language, time, history, and how stories hold us together when everything else is falling apart. But I went into it with one obsession: how COVID is represented and how it shapes both the main character and the narrative structure. Read with that lens, the book is fascinating: the form itself feels infected, disrupted, constantly mutating.
That said, as much as I admired what Smith is doing here, I still love some of her earlier books more. Companion Piece is clever, strange, and occasionally mind‑melting, but it didn’t quite dethrone my favorites. So: a solid, thoughtful, slightly delirious 4 stars from me.
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