There But For The by Ali Smith (2011): A Review

Title: There But For The

Author: Ali Smith

Publication Year: 2011

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐💫

Pages: 288

Source: ebook

Genre: literary fiction, queer

Awards: longlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction

There But For The is Ali Smith’s fifth novel, starring a man named Miles Garth, an "ethical consultant" who decides the most ethical thing he can do is…lock himself in a spare room in a stranger’s house and stay there. For a long time. Why does he do it? Why does he stop doing it? Smith refuses to tell us in any straightforward way, and as someone who agrees with Katherine Mansfield’s “I hate mystery” (quoted in epigraph), I was not exactly thrilled to be handed this particular knot and told, “Enjoy!”

The book quickly wanders away from its human hermit and starts circling the lives of people who crossed paths with Miles at some point. He becomes less a character and more a rumor, the novel once heard and is still thinking about. Through them, Smith ruminates on time, space, politics (so many political references, so little unpacking), absence, “absent presence,” and every adverb, conjunction, and preposition that’s ever wanted to hang out in a literary novel.

Having read eight Ali Smith novels now, I’ve developed the kind of loyalty that makes you feel personally responsible for defending her every experimental choice. And yet, bias only stretches so far. I could not love this one. The prose felt like it was stuck in its own corridor, pacing back and forth without ever quite reaching the door. Reading it on a deadline did not help; watching the pages left shrink more slowly than my patience is not my favorite reading experience.

Structurally, it’s classic Smith: each chapter gives the stage to a different character.

1. Anna: An acquaintance of Miles from school days. With her, we go back to a European trip where they first met. It initially feels like a simple "we once went on holiday" story, until the book reminds you that nothing in an Ali Smith novel is ever just that.

1. Mark: A newer acquaintance who brings Miles to the fateful dinner party. Through Mark we walk straight into his grief and trauma, complete with his mother’s voice barging into his thoughts like an uninvited mental pop-up ad.

1. May Young: My favorite. An elderly woman with dementia who stopped speaking after losing her youngest daughter. Her chapters have emotional weight and a quiet power, and you keep reading to figure out how on earth she connects to Miles—and yes, that answer does arrive.

1. Brooke: The section I wish the editor had gently escorted out of the building. Brooke is a precocious child who is charming and sharp in small doses earlier in the book. Then she’s handed the entire narrative microphone, and suddenly the pace slows to a crawl. At one point she asks Miles, “Am I talking too much, she said, because I have been known before now to talk too much?” and I wanted to stand up, applaud her self-awareness, and then calmly take the mic away. Whose idea was it to give the longest POV section to the character least interested in brevity?

In theory, this novel lines up nicely with Smith’s other work—similar themes, similar fragmented structure, similar playful intelligence. In practice, it never quite came together for me. Like the Seasonal Quartet, it almost feels like it wanted to be multiple books: one for the party and its political chaos, one for May, one for Brooke’s verbal marathon, and one where Miles finally explains what on earth he is doing.

The book tosses in a lot of political references, especially around that infamous party, but rarely lingers long enough to let them develop. Personally, I don’t enjoy a novel that simply drops issue after issue into the text like it’s scattering flyers and then walks away. I want themes to actually live in the book, not just make a cameo. If the story is going to bring them in, I’d like them to show up properly, not hover in the background like Miles in his locked room.

Maybe that’s the whole point—that everything and everyone here is an absent presence, here and not-here at once, and I’m resisting exactly what the book is trying to do. Or maybe I understood it perfectly and just didn’t like it. Both possibilities are, unfortunately for me, entirely plausible.