February 1, 2009
Yesterday I read The First Person by Ali Smith, a collection of her short stories. I did not like the stories; I did not like Smith's style of writing as presented in these short stories at all. Her writing is highly self-conscious and stylized, and the style is monotonous and repetitive. The title of the collection refers to the narrative style used, the first person, but in fact the title should be, for accuracy's sake, THE FIRST PERSON, indicating that her voice is everything, she the writer has taken center stage. I think better writing comes when the writer stays offstage and invisible, coming out only through her characters, even if the character uses first person narrative. I was just too aware of Smith's hand in everything. One more strike against her style: I am usually irritated by stories that use a "you" to address the reader throughout, as if I were a player in the scene; it's even ten times worse when the stories actually assign a role to me, as a few of these stories do.
Smith quotes Murakami on imagination: "Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine." But I don't see that particular muscle flexed too much here -- and imagination is a muscle, we all have it, just some of us were born with it sculpted and strong (just as some people have such leg and arm muscles although they do nothing more than walk from bed to table to couch) and some of us have to work at it. Everyone has to use their imagination to foster it, to make it strong and flexible and resilient. Imagination is not mimicry or recollection but a reshaping of sights and sounds and smells to present a new view on an old landscape --or a new landscape we've never seen before.
The first story would actually have served as an excellent intro piece to this collection of short stories, discussing as it does what is a short story: it is a "nymph", unlike a novel which is an "old whore". Hmmm.... However, this piece did not work as a short story on any level. The second story, "Child", was a bright spot and quite funny. Too bad that the rest of the stories do not meet the promise set forth in that short but sweet slice of other-dimensional child minding.
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