Ali Smith’s Four Seasons
By: James Mustich
Tags: Literature, Book Review, Reading, Books And Authors, Books

Ali Smith’s Four Seasons

Writing through time, real and imagined.

David Hockney paintings on the cover of the UK editions of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet.

About three-quarters of the way through Ali Smith’s novel, Autumn, a young woman named Elisabeth pulls a chair up to the bedside of an elderly former neighbor whom she is visiting in a care home. He is asleep, or drifting in and out of the past and present of nearly a hundred years of dreams.

She’d brought the chair from the corridor. She’d shut the door to the room. She’d opened the book she bought today. She’d started to read from the beginning, quite quietly, out loud. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us. The words had acted like a charm. They’d released it all, in seconds. They’d made everything happening stand just far enough away.

It was nothing less than magic.

Who needs a passport?

Who am I? Where am I? What am I?

I’m reading.

Which brings Smith’s readers back, in the echoing of rhythm and memory, to the first line of Autumn: “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.” An appropriate enough invocation of the muse for a purposefully timely novel set in the year of 2016.

Autumn was the first volume of Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, the final installment of which, Summer, was published several months ago, concluding an ambitious, quixotic, angry, warmhearted, anxious, funny, generous project, provoked by the shredding of the social and political fabrics in both Britain and America in the times it encompasses: the four years in which the novels were being composed. Steeped in the moods and apprehensions that headlines — migrant crises, immigration, climate change, Brexit, political corruption, COVID-19, Black Lives Matter — mark but do not adequately measure, Smith’s quartet is, at the same time, bracing, exhilarating, disorienting, and instructive; diverting, too, with a cast of misfit characters struggling to find a way to fit in an increasingly unfittable world. While her characters fumble forward, in and out of embraces and confrontations, in a semblance of real time, the author composes an experiment that enacts writing through time in an unconventional way.



But what are they about? What happens in Autumn, for instance: a woman (the aforementioned Elisabeth) tries to get a passport; she visits an old neighbor — Daniel Gluck — in a nursing home, recollecting as she does so events from their shared past, and her girlhood; she discovers, through her elderly friend, the art of the 1960s British Pop Art painter Pauline Boty, whose images, described in prose, are embedded in the text, and then the reader’s mind, like color plates; a fence is erected across formerly common land; Elisabeth’s mother appears on a television program — a version of Antiques Road Show — and falls in love with a TV star from her childhood; all the while the wider world seems on a road to environmental and political ruin along byways of bureaucratic inanity. Odd, even bewitching in up-close detail, the narration can feel off-hand on first encounter, but ends up tilling a fertile corner of one’s imagination. The subsequent volumes — Winter, Spring, and Summer, which appeared at more or less yearly intervals — follow much the same method, and have much the same effect. A longer narrative arc can be traced across the books as well, as imagery and characters weave in and out of the fictional year. If the four books are not tied up into a knot, they are connected along a looping yarn: in Summer, for instance, Elisabeth and her elderly friend reappear when characters from Winter come to visit Daniel to fulfill a mission left them in a legacy.



The books wander off course but find their way back through the kinetic connectivity of Smith’s language, which is charged with a wide and disarming range of reference, allusion, etymology, and quotation, and powered with an undercurrent of punning, rhythmical energy. Memes of the moment are turned upside down in a deeper well of brooding than their familiar newsfeed settings generally allow. A passage recalling a conversation from Elisabeth’s youth suggests the transformative nature of Smith’s emergent inventions:

I want to go to college, Elisabeth said, to get an education and qualifications so I’ll be able to get a good job and make good money.

Yes, but to study what? Daniel said.

I don’t know yet, Elisabeth said.

Humanities? Law? Tourism? Zoology? Politics? History? Art? Maths? Philosophy? Music? Languages? Classics? Engineering? Architecture? Economics? Medicine? Psychology? Daniel said.

All of the above, Elisabeth said.

That’s why you need to go to collage, Daniel said.

You’re using the wrong word, Mr Gluck, Elisabeth said. The word you’re using is for when you cut out pictures of things or coloured shapes and stick them on paper.

I disagree, Daniel said. Collage is an institute of education where all the rules can be thrown into the air, and size and space and time and foreground and background all become relative, and because of these skills everything you think you know gets made into something new and strange.

In their entwining of story and idea, character and issue, fiction and essay, learning and life, playfulness and purpose, Smith’s seasons took me back to the skittish genius of the French New Wave filmmakers, contemporaries of Pauline Boty, who made whatever crossed their path — old American movies, old master paintings, guerrilla warfare, cups of coffee, tricks of lighting and editing, advertisements, ticks of fashion, flights of philosophy — fit into their fleet cinematic compositions. It’s like watching an intelligence parse what experience offers it as a field of engagement, the randomness of the unordered pageant configured with a beginning, middle, and end (although — as Jean-Luc Godard put it — not necessarily in that order).