New Times,
New Thinking.

  1. Culture
  2. Books
19 August 2020

Ali Smith’s Summer highlights the risks and rewards of this experimental quartet

Perhaps it's best to think of Summer as something other than a novel or, at least, a distinct subgenre of the novel. Fast fiction? 

By Johanna Thomas-Corr

Early on in Ali Smith’s Summer, teenage Sacha is sitting on Brighton seafront when a text from a friend forces her to think about this thing called coronavirus that’s been swirling around the internet. She contemplates the images of the virus itself (“little planets covered in trumpets”) and the racist rumours that it came from Chinese people eating yellow snakes. A seagull catches her eye. Its yellow beak reminds her of the masks that Venetians wore during the plague. The little cotton face coverings people wear today, Sacha reflects, are like “nothing at all, dead leaves, blowaway litter, compared to the real masks, the ones on the faces of the planets’ liars”. She means politicians. A page later, she thinks: “Everything is mask… Everything needs to be unmasked, right now.”

Smith is intensely interested in that “right now”. Just as Autumn, the first part of her seasonal quartet, was hailed as the “first Brexit novel” on its publication four months after the referendum, so Summer – which opens in spring 2020 – is among the first Covid-19 novels. “Why [don’t we] allow the novel more to be what it says it is, novel?” she once asked. Since 2016, the Scottish author has attempted the book equivalent of going “live” on Instagram, writing four volumes that are about as up-to-the-minute as it is possible to be within the constraints of mainstream publishing.

Subscribe to The New Statesman today for only £1 per week
Content from our partners
Securonomics? Don’t forget UK agriculture
The future of exams
Skills are the key to economic growth