The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Like by Ali Smith
Michelle Latiolais

Ali Smith. Like. Virago (London), 1997. 343 pp. £12.99.

The first 150 pages of Like are captivating because at their narrative center is an eight-year-old girl by the name of Kate whose bemused and intelligent curiosity about both the natural and civilized world around her commands our respect, even our affection. She is reminiscent in a marvelous way of Colette’s Bel-Gazou, and one is happy to inspect figuratively the insides of this child’s pockets, to listen in on her taxonomic musings of the world. As we read on we understand that a mystery is also at the center of these pages, one which perhaps doesn’t rivet Kate quite so much as it does the reader. Why is Kate’s mother, Amy, incapable of reading and why does she upon seeing a picture of an erupting Vesuvius suddenly begin to regain not only her past, but her skills to read?
Narrative convention promises us we will find out the answers to these questions—and others—and in various intriguing movements in the key of flouting conventions we do. In the remaining two hundred pages of the novel the answers come not alongside Kate but rather in the voice of a character heretofore mentioned only teasingly, her mother’s would-be inamorata, a young Scottish woman by the name of Aisling, or Ash, who has “made it” as a movie star, perhaps a lesbian porn star.
I can’t figure out whether it was a bold move against the conventions of fiction or some failure of nerve on the part of the author to maintain a young girl as the central character in a longish novel ostensibly about the great to-ings and fro-ings of fates which then, by way of trickle-down, inform hers. But I’m not only never distracted from my interest in Kate by the novel’s remaining two hundred pages in Ash’s voice, my interest is also never satisfied by a return in the narrative to Kate’s life.
It’s all very sophisticated in a theoretical way, so very modern, and I admire the writing and the abilities of Ali Smith to create tremendous characters. If my interest in the novel eddied solely within the well of the intellect, then I think I’d have few reservations, but Ali Smith writes a better book than that, dramatizes a far more complicated emotional world; I was sorry a certain structural insistence disallowed connections less cerebral. Still, her work certainly deserves reading. [Michelle Latiolais]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Like by Ali Smith Michelle Latiolais Ali Smith. Like. Virago (London), 1997. 343 pp. £12.99. The first 150 pages of Like are captivating because at their narrative center is an eight-year-old girl by the name of Kate whose bemused and intelligent curiosity about both the natural and civilized world around her commands our respect, even our affection. She is reminiscent in a marvelous way of Colette’s Bel-Gazou, and one is happy to inspect figuratively the insides of this child’s pockets, to listen in on her taxonomic musings of the world. As we read on we understand that a mystery is also at the center of these pages, one which perhaps doesn’t rivet Kate quite so much as it does the reader. Why is Kate’s mother, Amy, incapable of reading and why does she upon seeing a picture of an erupting Vesuvius suddenly begin to regain not only her past, but her skills to read? Narrative convention promises us we will find out the answers to these questions—and others—and in various intriguing movements in the key of flouting conventions we do. In the remaining two hundred pages of the novel the answers come not alongside Kate but rather in the voice of a character heretofore mentioned only teasingly, her mother’s would-be inamorata, a young Scottish woman by the name of Aisling, or Ash, who has “made it” as a movie star, perhaps a lesbian porn star. I can’t figure out whether it was a bold move against the conventions of fiction or some failure of nerve on the part of the author to maintain a young girl as the central character in a longish novel ostensibly about the great to-ings and fro-ings of fates which then, by way of trickle-down, inform hers. But I’m not only never distracted from my interest in Kate by the novel’s remaining two hundred pages in Ash’s voice, my interest is also never satisfied by a return in the narrative to Kate’s life. It’s all very sophisticated in a theoretical way, so very modern, and I admire the writing and the abilities of Ali Smith to create tremendous characters. If my interest in the novel eddied solely within the well of the intellect, then I think I’d have few reservations, but Ali Smith writes a better book than that, dramatizes a far more complicated emotional world; I was sorry a certain structural insistence disallowed connections less cerebral. Still, her work certainly deserves reading. [Michelle Latiolais]

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