The Whole Story and Other Stories
by Ali Smith
192pp, Hamish Hamilton, £10.99
In Ali Smith's story "Virtual", a woman goes to visit her aunt, who is in hospital for a minor operation. While she is there she sees in a neighbouring bed a beautiful girl so emaciated that her legs "were like the legs of one of those white bodies from the last war dead on the ground and bulldozed into a pit". The girl, she discovers, is anorexic and has had to drop out of university.
In order to see the girl again, the narrator comes to visit her aunt a second time, unnecessarily. It transpires that her aunt isn't really her aunt, but a close friend of the narrator's dead mother. "What would your mother say?" she asks, mocking her too-assiduous visitor. "Her bad daughter being so good at last?" The narrator offers to feed her aunt's fish, and worries what she could have meant by calling her "bad". She worries that she will overfeed the fish and kill them, which she's heard is easy to do.
On her third and final visit to her aunt, the anorexic girl speaks to her. She has her whole family there and they have given her a small Japanese toy called a virtual pet. She's supposed to look after it: it's a clumsy parental message, telling her that it would do her good to take care of something, to think about something other than herself. I hate it, the girl tells the narrator despairingly. It's really irritating. The narrator returns home and wanders around the house. "I couldn't think what to do," she says. "I couldn't imagine what to do next, or how to be able to do it right."
This is a story as good as anything Raymond Carver ever wrote: it comes from Smith's 1999 collection, Other Stories and Other Stories . What distinguishes it is its linearity. Where the unskilled writer of short fiction crowds everything around a single observation and hence begins and ends in the same place, a story such as "Virtual" is a process of transition. It remains faithful to the sequence of time; it demonstrates how, as human beings, we are transformed by the act of living.
In "Scottish Love Songs", a story from The Whole Story , two different women are haunted by a spectral Scottish bagpipe band "in full regalia". Needless to say, comparisons with Raymond Carver don't, in this instance, suggest themselves.
I'm sure there are many who delight in Smith's bizarre side, but in this age of lies I want to be told the truth. Smith's mastery of the sublime is God-given, but her loyalty to the ridiculous is rather more manufactured. Reading her stories and her Booker-shortlisted novel, Hotel World , one quickly comes to feel that one is in the presence of a writer of unusual nakedness, whose fear of marginalisation causes her to clothe her disclosures in idiosyncrasies. This nakedness is what she shares, strikingly, with Carver, yet his sensibility holds its shape more consistently than hers because his canvas is more fastidious: he dominates his own fictional world so that his voice can't be compromised. In this new collection, Smith offers her fragility as part of an assortment, so that "The Book Club", a stringent, beautiful little tale with a mechanism like a Swiss watch, about memory, death and the difficulty of expressing love, sits alongside "May", an opaque, rambling narrative about someone who becomes obsessed with a tree.
She may believe that her art is bound up with darkness and should be counterbalanced by play, but, in fact, it is when she tells the truth that Smith effortlessly transcends the standard parameters of contemporary fiction. "Paradise", a long and mostly brilliant story about tourism, demonstrates exactly why this is. The first part of the story is concerned with a hold-up in a provincial Scottish burger bar, in which the thieves brandish garden shears and a leafblower. The second describes a cruise on Loch Ness, during which Gemma, a callow girl working on the boat as a holiday job before going to college, has become so brutalised by indifference that she refuses to give water to a tourist suffering dehydration. The first is unbelievable; the second isn't.
What is unsatisfying about The Whole Story is that it shows Smith capitulating to her tendency to the arch and the outlandish, while her tender understanding of human love and sorrow lies fallow. It's hard not to feel that her voice is wasted on a story about a fly in a second-hand bookshop; but still, I'd rather read that than most of what passes for good writing.
· Rachel Cusk's The Lucky Ones is published by Fourth Estate.