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Summary
Summary
From the award-winning author of Hotel World and The Accidental , a dazzling, funny, and wonderfully exhilarating new novel.
At a dinner party in the posh London suburb of Greenwich, Miles Garth suddenly leaves the table midway through the meal, locks himself in an upstairs room, and refuses to leave. An eclectic group of neighbors and friends slowly gathers around the house, and Miles's story is told from the points of view of four of them: Anna, a woman in her forties; Mark, a man in his sixties; May, a woman in her eighties; and a ten-year-old named Brooke. The thing is, none of these people knows Miles more than slightly. How much is it possible for us to know about a stranger? And what are the consequences of even the most casual, fleeting moments we share every day with one another?
Brilliantly audacious, disarmingly playful, and full of Smith's trademark wit and puns, There but for the is a deft exploration of the human need for separation--from our pasts and from one another--and the redemptive possibilities for connection. It is a tour de force by one of our finest writers.
Author Notes
Ali Smith was born in 1962 in Inverness. She is a Scottish writer. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a PhD. She worked as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde until she fell ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Following this she became a full-time writer[4] and now writes for The Guardian, The Scotsman, and the Times Literary Supplement.
In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Smith was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to literature. Her short story colection includes: Free Love and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories, and The First Person and Other Stories. Her novels include: Like, Hotel World, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy, There But For The, and How to Be Both. She was short listed for the Folio Prize 2015. She won the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction for her novel How to be Both.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In the middle of an English dinner party, Miles Garth excuses himself from the table, locks himself in the guest room, and refuses to leave. As the weeks and then months drag on, hostess Gen-portrayed by narrator Anne Flosnik as an afflicted damsel in distress-goes through Miles's address book to enlist friends, however remote, to coax the unwanted boarder out of his lair. The first rescue attempt is made by Anna-who met Miles decades earlier on a school trip-whom Flosnik deftly renders as a classy and good-natured Glaswegian, perplexed that Miles even remembered her. After Anna, Flosnik's performance declines: Mark-who met Miles in a theater-sounds much like the audio's other men, while the voice given to Brooke, the 10-year-old who makes a final attempt at extricating Miles, is too similar to those of the book's other children-all of them bright and high-pitched. Flosnik's narration is, however, well paced and entertaining, and this-coupled with Smith's playful language, rhymes, songs, and imaginative plot-will enchant listeners. A Pantheon hardcover. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The unwanted houseguest strikes terror in the hearts of even the most seasoned hosts. So imagine Londoner Genevieve Lee's chagrin when Miles, a dinner-party guest in her posh Greenwich home, locks himself in an upstairs bedroom and refuses to leave. Miles seems like a perfectly normal chap, and Mark, his companion for the evening, has no idea what has come over his friend. Days and weeks (!) pass, and Genevieve and her husband's predicament becomes prime fodder for the tabloids. Curious citizens convene on the Lees' front lawn, hoping for a glimpse of their long-term visitor. Smith reveals Miles' story through a quartet of narrators: fetching fortysomething Anna; dinner mate Mark; quirky octogenarian May; and precocious 10-year-old Brooke. Through their voices, Miles' many manias are revealed. Wordplay peppers Whitbread Award winner Smith's pithy prose, linguistic athleticism that is clever and engaging (though at times a bit too much). Her latest offering is likely to leave readers a bit wary of those they welcome into their homes.--Block, Allison Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ALI SMITH loves words. She loves playing with them, calling attention to them, listening to them as if they were members of a vast extended family, each precious in its own right and she their fair-minded parent, determined not to play favorites. She can give the word "but" such a star turn that you wonder why you'd ever taken it for granted. Smith's love of language lights up all her books, a body of work that encompasses four previous novels and four volumes of short stories, and that has garnered prizes including the Whitbread Award in Britain. But (Oh there it is! As one of Smith's characters says, "The thing I particularly like about the word but . . . is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting") Smith's wordplay never comes at the expense of the many other facets in her complicated creations - characters, places, ideas. Smith's new novel, "There but for the," is a witty, provocative urban fable about an unexpected guest who shows up at a dinner party in the London suburb of Greenwich and then, midway through, locks himself inside the guest bedroom and refuses to leave. The novel is divided into four main sections, "There," "But," "For" and "The," though the title phrase is nowhere spoken, leaving us to wonder which "There" Smith is referring to, and whether she intends for her readers' minds to echo with the phrase "Grace of God Go I" - and if so, which God and, for that matter, which I. Such uncertainties typify Smith's sly and circuitous method. She is not a writer to seize on if linearity and a clear plotline are what you're after. On the other hand, if you enjoy surprising, often comic insights into contemporary life, she's someone to relish. Miles Garth, the dinner guest whose self-enclosure forms the heart of the novel's mystery, is presented through the narratives of four characters whose lives are tangentially related to his, so we come to understand the enigmatic (yet apparently benign) Miles chiefly through other people's memories, projections or fantasies. We perceive him, perhaps, a little like the way we perceive God - which may explain why Miles's self-imprisonment eventually inspires TV news coverage and a reverent cult following whose members gather behind the house, cheering on this stranger they call "Milo." (The book is full of people calling one another by the wrong name.) Smith's previous novel, "The Accidental," a finalist for the Man Booker Prize in 2005, also sent a stranger into a household to disrupt its domestic life. In that case, the unsettled family provided the story's main characters; here, the dinner hosts Genevieve and Eric and their teenage daughter remain peripheral to the storytelling. They despair over how to rid themselves of the man they take to calling "O.U.T." (Our Unwanted Tenant), even slipping Miles, who's a vegetarian, slices of ham under the door as a way of persuading him to decamp. The first of the four narrators-about-Miles is a Scotswoman, Anna Hardie, who met him years earlier when they were part of a group of young people sent on a two-week tour of Europe because they'd won a writing competition. Anna hasn't seen Miles for a couple of decades, but her e-mail address was in his mobile phone, so Genevieve has contacted her in the frantic hope she might talk Miles into leaving. Anna fails, but not before exploring one of the novel's main themes, the slippery difference between presence and absence, given that those who are apparently absent (like the dead) can feel more present than the people right in front of you. Anna has recently given up a job as a "senior liaison" at a refugee agency that she jokingly calls the "Center for Temporary Permanence," a phrase that might also describe Miles's situation. Anna remembers Miles as a kind, funny young man who took the time to befriend her when she was an alienated high schooler, someone who "had not expected, out in the world, to find herself quite so much the wrong sort of person." Her recollection jibes with other details that gradually accumulate about Miles. He was amiable and playful with Mark, an older gay man who tried to pick him up at the theater, though Miles doesn't seem to be gay. He offered sympathy over the years to May, an elderly woman who long ago lost her teenage daughter. And at the dinner party itself he took an interest in the neighbors' child, Brooke, who also came to the table only half-invited. It is through Anna that we first encounter Brooke, the "preternaturally articulate" girl who becomes the center of the novel's final section. Nine-year-old Brooke, a cheerful, remarkably precocious child who trades quotations from "Hamlet" with her academic parents, is reading Conrad's novel "The Secret Agent" and supplies many historical facts about Greenwich and its Royal Observatory. In finding a way to communicate with the reclusive Miles, Brooke brings to mind other wise children in literature, like Scout in "To Kill a Mockingbird." Brooke also bears some resemblance to the bright and bullied 12-year-old girl in Smith's own novel "The Accidental." SMITH frequently notes the misapprehensions any group may have about another - whites about blacks, straight people about gay people, citizens about refugees. This means that the dinner party, which forms a set piece about a third of the way through, has rather starkly drawn sides. On the good and cultured side are the two unmarried men and Brooke's parents, who can discuss Busby Berkeley or George Berkeley. On the other, philistine side are an aggressive man 'who makes surveillance drones; a husband having a secret affair with Mark who refers to gay people as "you lot"; and a woman who interrogates the black couple at the table about whether they've seen tigers "at home" and notes of Mark, after he has left the room, that "he's not as neat and clean" as gay men "usually are." At this juncture, Miles's decision to leave the dinner party seems entirely sensible, and Smith's novel appears to be taking as its safe target the complacency of a middle-class couple who think of gays or people of color as "alternative," and who won't break in on Miles because they don't want to destroy their home's possibly authentic antique doors. (Smith enjoys the fact that Genevieve and Eric together could be thought of as GenEric.) But when the narrative turns to the elderly May, Smith's expansive humanism returns in a wonderful, complex account of this vibrant character, one that touches on aging, family ties, death and "the intimate," as May mistakenly calls the wired world to which everyone but her seems to belong. Observing a teenager hunched over her cellphone, May reflects, "It was like they were all on drugs, cumbersome like cattle, heads down, not seeing where they were going." This lively, moving narrative is filled with such details, with historical and musical lore and, above all, with puns. All the likable characters in "There but for the" enjoy a good verbal game, most happily with someone else. It is as though playing with language is what enables them to make their way through a complicated world. It's a knack that might also be picked up, most enjoyably, by reading Ali Smith. Smith explores how those who are absent (like the dead) can feel more present than people in front of you. Sylvia Brownrigg's novel for children, "Kepler's Dream," will be published next spring under the pen name Juliet Bell.
Guardian Review
I'd forgotten what a clever writer Ali Smith is and, possibly more important after McGregor's emotional battering, how funny. This is a quirky, some might say over-tricksy, story about a man who goes to a dinner party in Greenwich and outstays his welcome. At some point between the scallops with chorizo and chili creme brulee, while the other guests discuss art and conservation but please, begs the hostess, not the recession, Miles Garth slips upstairs, barricades himself into the spare room and refuses either to communicate or come out. Why? Four different characters attempt to explain in chapters called after the four title words (I said it was tricksy), starting with "There" and Anna, who is Scottish, knew Miles as a student, has a thing about euphemistic acronyms such as Grace (or group routing and changing equipment, aka redundancy), and sounds suspiciously, delightfully like the author. I'd forgotten what a clever writer Ali Smith is and, possibly more important after McGregor's emotional battering, how funny. This is a quirky, some might say over-tricksy, story about a man who goes to a dinner party in Greenwich and outstays his welcome.
Kirkus Review
Charming and intelligent, Miles Garth is in many ways a desirable guest. And when he accompanies handsome 60-year-old Mark Palmer to Genevieve and Eric Lee's annual "alternative" dinner party in Greenwich, it is assumed Miles is the older man's new lover. He is not, and has in fact just met Mark at a theater performance. Halfway through the meal, Miles heads upstairs ostensibly to use the bathroom, and does not come back down.Sequestered in the Lees' extra room, he offers no explanation but does pass a note requesting vegetarian meals be sent under the door. At a loss over what to do, Genevieve tracks down Anna Hardie, a Scottish woman who met Miles briefly when they were teenagers. As Anna recalls his kindness to her during a school trip, she begins to come to terms with her own past and uncertain future. Miles has that affect on people. Anna also befriends Brooke, a precocious, lonely 9-year-old neighbor girl who met Miles at the party as well. Meanwhile, news of Miles' weird sit-in ripples throughout the community, and people begin to think of him as some kind of folk hero with almost mystical powers. That Miles is both more and less than he appears to be is part of the fun in this witty, deconstructed mystery. With its shifting points of view, Smith (The First Person: and Other Stories, 2009, etc.) displays a virtuoso gift for channeling her character's inner voices. Happily, the book manages to wear its profundity lightly. Offbeat exploration of the human need to connect with others.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Like several recent novels, notably Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, and Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists, this work is a collection of interlocking stories organized around a single theme and featuring multiple characters. Here the tales swirl around an unusual event at an upscale dinner party in Greenwich, England, where guest Miles Garth disappears into an upstairs bedroom at the home of his hosts and refuses to come out for weeks. Smith, whose eight previous works of fiction include the Whitbread Award-winning The Accidental, deftly satirizes our media-saturated environment, using an oddball cast of characters to point out the difficulty we have in making genuine human connections and demonstrating how beautiful and rare it is when we actually succeed. The passage of time is a constant underlying preoccupation as well, as befits the setting-home of the Royal Observatory, which established Greenwich Mean Time. VERDICT Though some of the plot points strain credulity, when read as a fable, this is a delightful, beautifully written, touching novel that will strongly appeal to lovers of language and wordplay. [See Prepub Alert, 3/21/11.]-Lauren Gilbert, Cold Spring Harbor Lib. & Environmental Ctr., NY (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
There was once a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party. There was once a woman who had met this man thirty years before, had known him slightly for roughly two weeks in the middle of a summer when they were both seventeen, and hadn't seen him since, though they'd occasionally, for a few years after, exchanged Christmas cards, that kind of thing. Right now the woman, whose name was Anna, was standing outside the locked bedroom door behind which the man, whose name was Miles, theoretically was. She had her arm raised and her hand ready to -- to what? Tap? Knock discreetly? This beautiful, perfectly done-out, perfectly dulled house would not stand for noise; every creak was an affront to it, and the woman who owned it, emanating disapproval, was just two feet behind her. But it was her fist she was standing there holding up, like a 1980s cliché of a revolutionary, ready to, well, nothing quiet. Batter. Beat. Pound. Rain blows. Strange phrase, to rain blows. Somewhere over the rainblow. She didn't remember much about him, but they'd never have been friends in the first place if he wasn't the sort to enjoy a bad pun. Was he, unlike Anna right now, the kind of person who'd know what to say to a shut door if he were standing outside one trying to get someone on the other side to open it? The kind who could turn to that child stretched on her front as far up the staircase as her whole small self would go, the toes of her bare feet on the wood of the downstairs hall floor and her chin in her hands on the fifth step lying there watching, and straight off be making the right kind of joke, what do you call two mushrooms on holiday? Fun guys, straight off be holding forth about things like where a phrase like to rain blows came from in the first place? The woman standing behind Anna sighed. She somehow made a sigh sound cavernous. After it the silence was even louder. Anna cleared her throat. Miles, she said to the wood of the door. Are you there? But the bleat of her voice left her somehow less there herself. Ah, now, see -- that's what it took, the good inappropriateness of that child. Half boy, all girl, she'd elbowed herself up off the staircase, run up the stairs and was about to hammer on the door. Bang bang bang. Anna felt each thud go through her as if the child were hammering her on the chest. Come out come out wherever you are, the child yelled. Nothing happened. Open sesame, the child yelled. She had ducked under Anna's arm to knock. She looked up at her from under her arm. It makes the rock in the side of the mountain open, the child said. They say it in the story, therefore the rock just like opens. The child put her mouth to the door and spoke again, this time without shouting. Knock knock, she said. Who's there? Who's there? There were several reasons at that particular time in Anna Hardie's life for her wondering what it meant, herself, to be there. One was her job, which she had just given up, in what she and her colleagues laughingly called Senior Liaison, at what she and her colleagues only half-laughingly called the Centre for Temporary Permanence (or, interchangeably, the Centre for Permanent Temporariness). Another was that Anna had woken up a couple of weeks ago in the middle of her forties in the middle of the night, from a dream in which she saw her own heart behind its ribcage. It was having great trouble beating because it was heavily crusted over with a caul made of what looked like the stuff we clean out of the corners of our eyes in the mornings when we wake up. She woke up, sat up and put her hand on her heart. Then she got up, went to the bathroom mirror and looked. There she was. The phrase reminded her of something Denny at the Evening News, with whom she'd worked on neighbourhood liaison pieces and with whom she'd had a short liaison herself, had told her some time ago, on their second and last lunchtime. He was a sweet man, Denny. He'd stood in front of her in her kitchen, their first time, and presented his penis to her very sweetly, rueful and hopeful both, a little apologetic about his erection and at the same time proud of it; she liked this. She liked him. But two lunchtimes was all it was, and they both knew it. Denny had a wife, her name was Sheila, and their two girls and their boy were at Clemont High. Anna made a pot of tea, put sugar and milk on the tray because she wasn't sure what he took, carried it upstairs, slid back into the bed. It was a quarter past one. They had just under half an hour left. He'd asked could he smoke. She'd said, okay, since it's the last lunch. He'd smiled. Then he'd turned over in the bed, lit the cigarette, changed the subject. He'd said did she know he could sum up the last six decades of journalism in six words? Go on then, she said. I was there. There I was, he said. It was a commonplace, he said. By the middle of the twentieth century every important report put it like this: I was there. Nowadays: There I was. Soon it would be seven words, Anna said. The new century had already added a seventh word. There I was, guys. She and Denny had laughed, drunk their tea, put their clothes back on and gone back to their different jobs. The last time they'd spoken was some months ago, about how to handle the story with the local kids giving urine to the asylum kids in lemonade bottles to drink. In the middle of the night, some months later, holding her own heart, feeling nothing, Anna had looked at herself in the mirror in the bathroom. There she was. It was the there-she-was guise. There she was again, then, two evenings ago, sitting in front of her laptop one summer evening with the noise of Wimbledon coming from neighbours' TVs through the open windows of the houses all around. Wimbledon was on her own TV too. Her own TV's sound was turned down. It was sunny in London and the Wimbledon grass was still bright green, only a little scuffed. The TV screen flickered away by itself beyond the laptop screen. Pock noises and oohs and ahs, strangely disconnected from their source, accompanied the little noises she was making on her keyboard. It was as if the whole outside world was TV soundtrack. Maybe there was a new psychosis, Tennis Players' Psychosis (TPP), where you went through life believing that an audience was always watching you, profoundly moved by your every move, reacting round your every reaction, your every momentous moment, with joy /excitement / disappointment / Schadenfreude. Presumably all professional tennis players had something like it, and maybe so to some extent did everybody who still believed in God. But would this mean that people who didn't have it were somehow less there in the world, or at least differently there, because they felt themselves less observed? We might as well pray to the god of tennis players, she thought. We might as well ask that god as ask any other for world peace, to keep us safe, to bring all the birds that've ever died, ever sunk into dust via little mounds of feather and crumbling hollow little bones, back to life, perch them all on that sill right now, the small ones at the front and the large ones at the back, and have them sing a rousing chorus of Bye Bye Blackbird, which was a song her father used to whistle when she was a little girl, and one she hadn't heard for many years. No one here to love or understand me. Oh what hard-luck stories they all hand me. Was that it? Something about hard-luck stories, anyway. Just as she was about to look the lyrics up on the net new mail came pinging into her inbox with an electronic little trill. The new mail was quite a long email which Anna nearly mistook for the please-transfer-money-to-this-account-because--I-am-dying-and-need-your-help kind. But she paused her finger above delete when something about it caught her eye. It was addressed to her with the correct first name but the wrong surname initial. Dear Anna K. It was both her and not her, the name. More: something about it made her feel super-eighted, instamaticked. It gave her a feeling something like the word summer used to. Most of all it reminded her of an old spinebent copy of a Penguin classic paperback by Kafka, yes, Franz Kafka, which she had read one summer when she was sixteen or seventeen. Excerpted from There but for The by Ali Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
