Adolescent Elisabeth's pushback against her single mother's growing alarm about her "father fixation" and the way she's "always hanging round with an old gay man" provide a good foil to her generally delightful, but sometimes didactic or even twee dialogues with Daniel.
Nobody didn't speak like Daniel."Īs she also demonstrated in How to be both, Smith has a bead on how mothers and daughters can get under each other's skin, in both good and annoying ways. Later, Elisabeth's boyfriends have a hard time living up to her Socratic friend. On long walks, he shares his love of art and language, teaching Elisabeth to spin stories and visualize paintings described with words, because "whoever makes up the story makes up the world." They discuss Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath.
He's quick to recognize a kindred spirit in the whip-smart eight-year-old - Elisabeth evokes memories of his brilliant younger sister, who was rounded up by Nazis in Nice in 1943, while he was at school in England. They fall apart, always have, always will, it's in their nature."īook Reviews An 'Artful' Approach To Literary Criticismįlashbacks to Elisabeth's childhood trace the charming arc of "artsy" Daniel's mentorship. is the threshold to the end of the world as she knows it." She reads A Tale of Two Cities to him, and in his somnolent state Daniel twists Dickens' opening lines to "It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Set this past summer and fall in a bitterly divided England during the unsettled, disheartening months following the Brexit vote, its heroine is a plucky 32-year-old art lecturer named Elisabeth Demand who is facing the loss of two things she holds dear: basic human decency, and the elderly neighbor who was her unofficial babysitter and unconventional soulmate in her childhood.Īs Daniel Gluck lies sleeping in a nursing home near Elisabeth's mother's village, "the cave of his mouth. Smith's latest novel, Autumn, is the first of a quartet planned to span the four seasons. Not since Salinger's plucky English orphan, Esmé, soothed an American sergeant's no-longer-intact faculties at the end of World War II has a writer so artfully and heartrendingly captured the two-way lifeline between preternaturally wise children (mainly girls) and young-at-heart gentle souls (mainly men) who forge special friendships that have nothing predatory or Lolita-ish about them. Salinger's natural heir? It's not as preposterous as it sounds. How?Ĭould Scottish writer Ali Smith be J.D.
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