the accidental, Smith. Yes. This is Ali Smith, not Zadie Smith of On Beauty, though this book, too, performed well (this one took first place) in the Tournament of Books. There is much I might have disliked about this book: the narrative style is flashy, there are not-infrequent somewhat extended passages where a narrative voice becomes fascinated with words, the structure does not lend itself to inattentive reading, those sorts of things. But the only features of the novel that bothered me were the typesetting (I never before realized how much easier to read a fully justified line of text is than ragged-right) and the title (for reasons I can’t possibly discover, I could not think of the title without starting to compose a song to the tune of “The Carioca” (“oh, have you read the accidental? It’s really very continental…” or “It’s only somewhat sentimental…”); ugh).
Update: To clarify somewhat, I’m a big fan of flashy narrative and am frequently myself fascinated with words to the point of distraction, but it’s been so long since I’ve read an author who could do those things in service of the story and the characters, rather than as an intrusive plea for attention, that I’ve taken to looking for simplicity. I suspect it may be easier for attention-seeking works to get published, so I have a notion that a simply written work that made it to my library shelves is more likely to be well crafted. Ali Smith’s verbal and structural games proved to be a delightful surprise.