Autumn

Autumn, by Ali Smith, is a quirky novel that doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. It's a bit like the elephant and the five blind man--you get a different sensation depending on what part of the book you read, and it's a very short book.

Ostensibly, it's about Elisabeth Demand, a woman of about thirty who is devoted to her best friend, an elderly man named Daniel Gluck. At first they were neighbors, when she was a young girl and sought him out to discuss many things, mostly art and music and life itself. He is very friendly with her, and tends to say profound things like, "It’s all right to forget, you know, he said. It’s good to. In fact, we have to forget things sometimes. Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we’d never sleep ever again."

During the novel's present Daniel is 101 and living in a nursing home, sleeping most of the time. Elisabeth comes to visit him dutifully, reading to him. At times he dreams about people of his past coming to visit him.

Then, as if on a dime, the book turns into a discussion of the artist Pauline Boty, who was a real person. She was the only female British pop artist, and was also very beautiful in that swinging London way, even getting a part in the film Alfie. Elisabeth becomes obsessed with her, and decides to write her dissertation about Boty, having something to do with images of images and what it is to be female.

Another offshoot is about the Profumo scandal, as Boty had painted a few works of Christine Keeler, the woman at the center of the scandal. It's as if Smith didn't know where the novel was going, and just followed a trail of bread crumbs.

I give the book three stars out of five because of its sense of humor. Early in the book is an encounter Elisabeth has at a post office getting her passport. It's like something out of a Monty Python sketch. There is also some funny stuff with Elisabeth's mother, who participates in a reality show based on antiques. She puts up with her mother with good humor, at one point thinking, "Elisabeth is faintly perturbed. She realizes this is because she likes to imagine her mother knows nothing much about anything." Late in the book she has this epiphany: "Has her mother been this witty all these years and Elisabeth just hasn’t realized?"

This is the first book of a tetralogy, each with a title naming the four seasons. Though the book is not exclusively set in autumn, the word wends its way through the text, to wit: "October’s a blink of the eye. The apples weighing down the tree a minute ago are gone and the tree’s leaves are yellow and thinning. A frost has snapped millions of trees all across the country into brightness. The ones that aren’t evergreen are a combination of beautiful and tawdry, red orange gold the leaves, then brown, and down."

That's lovely but I can't see myself reading the next three books. I was just too confused.