Preoccupied with Celluloid

...Smith employs an internalized third-person voice, as if she has entered the head of each one in turn and is channeling their thoughts and feelings...

...She is the older woman who initiates him sexually in an empty church, and through her he finds absolution from sin—punishment, confession, cleansing, the power to openly offer love and tenderness...

...Who is she really, and why pick on this particular unhappy family...

...they must now confront, in a raw and unmediated way, the big questions, personal and universal—love, death, abuse of power, human oppression...

...Amber is the accidental, the unexpected arrival...

...All that remains is the answering machine with three messages, informing them of Magnus' suspension from school, Michael's firing, and the lawsuit against Eve...

...Smith's writing is so dexterous and polished that Tlie Accidental comes off, for better or worse, as something of a performance—perhaps a chamber piece for a small ensemble that keeps the audience, in this case the reader, at a decent remove despite the intimacy of the setting...

...After Amber's departure, Eve, propelled also by a threatened lawsuit from the family of one of the "Genuines" whose life she has mined, leaves home to travel on her own, taking "a gap year from her own history...

...Each seamlessly segues to its four parts (like four scenes) that focus on the family members individually in a fixed order: Astrid, Magnus, Michael, andEve...

...In a kind of preface, she opens the book with a brief account of her conception in the movie house...

...Nothing is left for them to hide behind...

...When he is fired from his job for "putting the oral into tutorial, the semen into seminar, the stud into student," the sequence is collected for publication under a title borrowed from the Hitchcock movie The Lady Vanishes...

...So does the preoccupation with film, the overriding unifying feature of this novel steeped in references to cinema and laced with lines from movies as well as retellings of entire plots...

...That is the setup for Scottish writer Ali Smith's third novel, The Accidental, her second book, after Hotel World, to be short-listed for the Man Booker Prize...

...There is a genuine fascination with all forms of language, down to clichés and conjunctions...

...The place is a house in the English countryside that turns out, despite the write-up in the advert, to be "substandard...

...The story unfolds in three very tightly controlled sections (like three acts) entitled, in a no-nonsense way, "The Beginning," "The Middle," "The End...

...The answers, delivered through Amber, prove to be predictable pronouncements about facing truth and taking responsibility...

...From inspiration to execution, The Accidental relies on the prism of film and the mediation of the screen (Magnus "wonders why the thing films are shown on is called a screen...

...Smith's title evokes an unusual visitor showing up outside the range of its normal habitat...

...The occupants are four members of a complacent, upper-middle class British family stuck there for an extended summer holiday...

...She is the omniscient creator who sees through everything, truthful to the point of incredulity (announcing, for instance, that she is off to "ravish" Magnus sexually, but naturally nobody believes her...

...to deliver its perspective on contemporary values and culture...

...She appears at the door of the Smarts' Norfolk rental claiming, falsely, that her car has broken down, and penetrates their closed domestic world...

...In a stark metaphor for the purification they must submit themselves to upon acquiring self-knowledge, they return to London to find their home stripped bare of every single item, down to the "arts and crafts" doorknobs...

...he is tormented with guilt over a prank he abetted with his computer know-how—pasting the face of a lower sixth-form girl to a porn site body—that led to her suicide...

...When Amber gets into bed with her, Astrid "thinks her heart might combust right out of her chest id est the happiness" (i.e., or id est, is one of Astrid's signature precocious-child verbal tics...

...Beyond those themes, the novel is preoccupied with language and story...

...She is named for the Alhambra movie house where she was conceived in 1968 in a one-night stand between the junior projectionist and her mother, turned on from watching Terence Stamp, an actor of exceptional "numinousness," in the film Poor Cow...

...And she has the last word, in a sort of afterword following "The End...

...One has the sense of viewing a heaving little nest through a magnifying glass, its inhabitants scurrying mindlessly about their daily business, then witnessing an interesting experiment that stirs them up with a stick (the way Astrid pokes a near dead animal she's trying to film) just to see what happens...

...The two women of the family effectively become Amber: Eve takes on the mission of casting a merciless light on hypocrisy, lies, cruelty, and exploitation, while Astrid the "asteroid," child of the 21 st century, hurtles through space "to heatseek all the disgustingness and the insanity...

...By the time she is kicked out by Eve, they are all forced, in the unforgiving light she bears down upon them, to re-examine their lives and to change...

...she also closes "The Beginning" with a filmframed evocation of the year of her birth ("a time of light, speed, celluloid...

...His sister Astrid, 12, broods over bullying she has endured from her clique at school as she passes her time filtering reality through her expensive Sony digital video camera, filming daily dawns and expiring road kill...

...The result, notwithstanding the highminded themes earnestly and skillfully raised, is a book that all seems far away, unreal, as if stretched out across a screen—like a film viewed through a film...

...Stepfather Michael, a literature professor and dedicated philanderer—who keeps a wall in his office covered with postcards from his conquests—even on vacation does not take a break, setting out for London to accommodate his latest willing student...

...Eve Smart, the mother, a successful writer of something called the "Genuine Article Series"—a sort of "what-if " concept imagining the lives of specific real people who died around World War II— sits in a shed in the yard, seriously blocked...

...A sharp riff on "and," to cite one example, has Magnus concluding that the word "is a little bullet of oxygen...

...It is reminiscent of another Terence Stamp movie, Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema, in which a bourgeois Milanese family of four is radically shaken up by the intrusion of a seductive stranger...

...Into this mix throw a mysterious stranger, Amber MacDonald, who arrives at the door one day...

...And oddly enough, this distancing effect is somehow compounded by Smith's dazzling verbal display, which pushes the reader back even more deeply into the role of spectator...

...Magnus," as she christens him, "Amber angel" appears almost miraculously in the bathroom where he is trying to hang himself, then bathes and restores him...

...From Amber, Astrid learns the responsibility of "actually seeing, being there...

...her name, the object of a great deal of wordplay, "means lamps lit in the dark...

...Amber alone addresses the reader in the first person...

...On a walk through town, Amber casually drops Astrid's camera from a bridge over a roadway, where it is promptly crushed by a passing truck...

...What is it in front of...

...Eve's contact with the intruder begins with Amber shaking her hard, and ends with Amber giving her a black eye...

...For "St...

...There is something almost clinical about Amber's enterprise, the central animating device of The Accidental...

...Seventeen-year-old math whiz Magnus vegetates unwashed in his room...

...in between, Amber calls Eve a fake, tells her she's really dead, and kisses her on the mouth...

...She returns to the Alhambra, to both the debasement of the Moorish palace in Spain and the decay of its namesake movie house in Scotland, "packed with inflammable filmstock" that she stands ready to ignite...

...In nature (say.bird-watching...

...As Magnus thinks at one point, she is "unbelievable," attached to no one, floating, elusive...

...She shows her face at her whim, makes a big mess, then leaves...

...Over the course of her stay, every member of the household comes under her spell and falls in love with her...

...To Astrid, Amber is a "superheroine" who simultaneously attracts and repels...

...By the novel's end, the men are transformedintopoetandpriest...

...She dispenses her tough love like a divine judge, favoring or rejecting men and women equally according to their deserts...

...Amber is the caution light...

...She concludes "The Middle" with a streaming history of the 20th century through cinema...

...Michael is inspired by his unrequited passion for Amber to compose a sonnet sequence, which, in all its verbal highs and lows, constitutes aportion of the novel's text...

...The Smarts are "broken," as they come to realize through Amber, who forces them to recognize the self-deception and smugness behind all their assumptions...