Last Interest in Books of Ali Smith

Maybe I will learn that until I am sure, positively sure, that I want to read everything by a particular author and then go about reserving everything that I can find by him/her.  From now on, I put them aside one after another.  Sequence is important:  I learned that yesterday ... do not put the garlic in with the onions and peppers when frying them for a recipe, add garlic later; similarly, add the tomatoes later or else you get skins and pulp and nothing round and red.

There but for The, is the cryptic title of Smith's book from 2011.  It reminds me of Crash and all those movies of parallel interpretations of one event witnessed by or entailing several different, diverse people.  Here someone invited to a dinner party in Greenwich, London, brings a friend with him and that friend locks himself in the hostess' guest room for months, for no apparent rhyme or reason.  Smith chunks up the story into four chapters, there, but, for, the, told by respectively a woman who traveled with the subject, Miles Garth, on a school trip decades ago, the person who brought him to the dinner, the dying mother of a childhood friend of Miles' and a precocious ten year, the child of another couple at the dinner.

I draw out from Smith's stories her interest in concurrent time, perception and narration.  In the first chapter, Smith uses Anna's voice to ponder the importance of talking:  "... What would happen if you did just shut a door and stop speaking?  Hour after hour of no words.  Would you speak to yourself?  Would words just stop being useful?  Would you lose language altogether?  Or would words mean more, would they start to mean in every direction, all somersault and assault, like a thuggery of fireworks?  Would they proliferate, like untended plantlife?  ... Would all things you'd ever forgotten, all layered there inside you, come bouldering up and avalanche you?"

Smith opines a story wherein the main character has nothing or very little to say, emphasizing the receiving/observing end of human communication.  We are saying what we hear, even when we are only talking in our heads to ourselves -- as May Young (Smith punning with surnames again) does in her stroke-addled mind.  But it is the gifted child, Brooke, who I believe is Smith's intended alter ego, the Cleverist.  Brooke is babbling (ha) but not childish prattle rather encyclopedic trivia seen through the eyes of a grammar schooler.  Brooke is the only one who can sneak inside and talk to Miles, who can exchange knock knock jokes with he who is self-barracaded on the other side of the door.  Brooke who plays with time as well as words, skipping school to stand on the GMT meridien.

There But For The ...
Specificity
Structure   
Chronology
Predictabilty
Standardization
Ambiguity
"dear reader, you do not need it"