Sticking with the Quartet, we meet characters with near-Dickensian names like Elisabeth Demand and Brit (a detention centre guard who has taken on elements of nationalist rhetoric), or names that push their owners to the point of allegory, like Art and Lux, as Walt Hunter discussesВ in this cluster.Д«ut Smith has never been too committed to using names as vehicles of plausibility.В In her 2011 novel There but for the, the bourgeois dinner-party hosting couple are named Gen and Eric Lee - generically, generic characters.

But there are also other kinds of letterplay and wordcraft that take place in Smith's fiction - often revolving around names and anagrams - that require a different scale of interpretative effort to unpick. These are all examples of what we might consider wordiness at the discursive level of narrative: they are part of conversations by characters, a kind of attention to the word which is acknowledged by those within the fiction. When Sacha's bright but troubled younger brother has superglued a glass sand timer to her hand, the malice of the action is diminished by Sacha's decision to make a joke out of it - she thanks her brother for 'the exceptional bonding experience.' 3 2 At other times, the wordiness of Smith's fiction comes in the guise of punning.

She doesn't really get to, though, at home, because Robert's meant to be the one who likes words.' 1 Sometimes the interest is expressed as a kind of soft lexical curation, the effect of which is to highlight a particular word - as when, less than ten pages into Summer, Sacha's mum peers over her shoulder as she writes an essay and asks whether 'devoutly' is 'the right word' for her sentence. We see, for instance, the latest in a long line of characters' statements about how words command a special kind of attention: the teenager Sacha decides to google the definition of 'antediluvian' because she 'quite likes words. In the final novel of the Quartet, Summer, it only takes a few pages before we encounter this wordiness in its various forms. If you have read anything by Ali Smith, you'll be familiar with the grip that all things lexical have on her authorial imagination.

Pdf wordsmith