"Art in an emergency" by Montana Patrick

Art in an emergency

Montana Patrick Summer by Ali Smith, Pantheon, 2020.

“How could we live in the world and not put our hand across a divide? How could we live with ourselves?” Ali Smith asks this of Olivia Laing in the latter’s recent essay collection Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency. “It isn’t either/or,” Smith adds. “It’s and/and/and. That’s what life is.”

In the piece—for which Smith was interviewed during the 2016 publication of Autumn, the first in her “seasonal quartet” of novels—she describes her feelings on the then-recent UK referendum and the ongoing refugee crisis—the overall sense of severance in the world which told her it was time to finally take on her long-planned project: four loosely-connected novels, each corresponding to a different season. The quartet is firmly rooted in the place from which many novelists flee in terror: the Now. Not the speculative now, or the more timeless, focused-from-thepast now. The now now.

The Now, in every sense: Brexit, the Trump era, the outcry over systemic racism and police brutality, immigration detention, the ongoing debate over our right to privacy, climate change, the rise of right-wing nationalism and even the COVID-19 pandemic—all are topics that make it onto the pages of Smith’s four novels, each written entirely within the span of the four months before it was sent to press and not long after,

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into bookshops. These are “novel novels,” the concept of which has always been a source of intrigue for Smith as both writer and reader, an idea which has fallen somewhat out of practice in the modern age of publishing and promotion.

“Dickens published as he was writing Oliver Twist,” Smith reminded readers of The Guardian in its review of 2019’s Spring.

“He was still making his mind up about the story halfway through. That’s why it’s called the novel—what it can do, what it’s for, what it does.”

This year, Smith’s Summer saw the completion of the quartet, arriving at a time situated on the precipice of a great divide of its own, albeit in a different sense: the divide between the before and after COVID-19.

If any writer were to take on such a daunting task as creating four distinct narratives on the playing stage of the unquestionably turbulent times we are living in, then surely it would have to be Smith. The deft wit, wry humor, provocative experimentation, and stunningly-moving compassion of her previous novels and stories are still very much present amid the (otherwise more distressing) aspects of the present that she glides her lens across in the quartet.

But what a brilliant lens it is to look through. Smith doesn’t shy away from employing the traditionally-Smithian themes that make up her previous work: Her delightfully mischievous wordplay, limitless appreciation for books and reading; the role that literature plays in bridging divides, the interest in the ways that life imitates art and art imitates nature and her achingly beautiful ruminations on love—they are all here, too.

In Summer, we focus on two somewhat-mirrored narratives, the first featuring a family of characters, the Greenlaws, who are unique to this entry in the quartet, and the second exhibiting the cyclical nature of the seasons, circling back around to Autumn’s

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protagonist, Daniel Gluck, a 101-year-old former songwriter.

Both narratives explore sibling relationships and reflect on the idea of borrowed time.

We are introduced to Sacha Greenlaw and her brother, Robert, two clever, passionate and wonderfully-sarcastic children (a common thread among Smith’s characters), and their mother Grace, a former theatre actress. While these characters are slightly less memorable and engaging as previous figures in the quartet (Autumn’s Daniel and Elisabeth, Winter’s Art and Charlotte, Spring’s Patricia and Richard) they still possess those wonderfully Smith-like charms and qualities that make them a delightful centerpiece for the stories here, steeped in the hopeful light and warmth of summer. Perhaps it is because they are young that Sacha and Robert’s observations of and arguments about current events—one is liberal, the other conservative—are capable of endearing the reader; there is something winning about characters who are both precocious, and somewhat naïve.

It is fitting that Smith decided to end her cycle with Summer, an at once slightly abstract and ephemeral conclusion to the quartet that still, somehow, very much manages to satisfy. “So we mourn it while we’re in it,” Grace contemplates over the season in the novel’s latter portion. “Look at me walking down a road in summer thinking about the transience of summer. Even while I’m right at the heart of it I just can’t get to the heart of it.”

Certainly one of the biggest successes of Summer, and the quartet as a whole, is the fact that Smith never comes close to underestimating her audience. She is not and has never been a writer to preach—to provide her own answers or conclusions to the questions and ideas she poses. Instead, she offers the reader tools. She points out where real work begins—with hope and compassion, a determination to see what is occurring in the world around us and the roles we play (or don’t play) in it every day.

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While Summer is the most abstract volume in Smith’s magnum opus, there is still so much to firmly take hold of and return to time and again, long beyond the overly-memorable year that the book was written, published and mostly set; Summer contains some of Smith’s most brilliant, poignant and devastatingly beautiful writing to date.