Synopsis
Barefoot, thirty-something Amber shows up at the door of a Norfolk cottage that the Smarts are renting for the summer, insinuating herself into their family. Dazzled by her seeming exoticism, the Smarts begin to examine the accidents of their lives under the searing lens of Amber’s perceptions. When the mother Eve finally banishes her from the cottage, Amber disappears from their sight, but not—as they find when they return home to London—from their profoundly altered lives. Fearlessly intelligent, disarmingly playful, THE ACCIDENTAL is a Joycean tour-de-force of literary improvisation that explores the nature of truth, the role of chance, and the transformative power of storytelling.
Original material © 2006 Elisabeth Hyde Recorded by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
The New Yorker
Smith’s book, which has just won Britain’s Whitbread Novel Award, concerns an attractive stranger who shows up on the doorstep of an unhappy family and is unquestioningly taken in. The visitor, armed with a perfect combination of candor, free-spiritedness, and rough love, proceeds to manipulate each of her hosts. Just as abruptly, and, perhaps, predictably, she disappears. We never learn much about her—her only purpose, it seems, was to jolt the family members out of their respective messes—and her righteous self-assurance can get tiresome. But the novel is saved by its skillful and touching rendering of the mental state of each family member. Smith’s well-honed, even obsessive prose gives a feeling of eavesdropping on her characters’ innermost thoughts.