Amber—thirtysomething and barefoot—shows up at the door of the Norfolk cottage that the Smarts are renting for the summer and insinuates herself into the family.
Everyone falls in love with Amber in a different way. But who is she, and what does she want? Essentially this is a modern-day reworking of Pasolini's 1968 film Theorem, in which unexpected dinner guest Terence Stamp charismatically destroys a bourgeois family. Here, too, the lives of Eve, Michael, Magnus and Astrid will never be the same after Amber's visitation … The Accidental has an infectious sense of fun and invention. The story goes through some surprising reversals and arrives at a satisfying conclusion, which is also a beginning.
It's difficult for any writer to pull off rotating viewpoints, but Smith does it perfectly, without a hint of clumsiness or tentativeness...It's especially hard considering how disparate the characters are. Astrid can't wait to grow up; Michael can't handle being an adult. Magnus is as consumed with his guilt as Eve is with her self-doubt. Smith captures the speech and thoughts of each character with a real, compassionate kind of virtuosity … It pays to be suspicious of writers who tie things up too neatly, who end novels a little too perfectly. But Smith doesn't have this problem – the last sentence of the book manages to be enlightening, confusing and almost destructive in its simple power.
Into this psychological briar patch strolls Amber, a blonde, brazen Rorschach blot of a houseguest who will profoundly shake up each family member before wearing out her welcome. She arrives one day, unannounced and very much uninvited, and immediately makes herself at home … Amber is flippant, caustic and conniving, traits that make her recognizably, albeit unattractively, human. But throughout The Accidental , up until the very last words, Smith drops subtle and tantalizing hints that Amber may in fact be a projection of the Smarts' damaged psyches, a shared delusion whose purpose is to rattle them out of their torpor and compel them to act … Though The Accidental is not a conventionally funny novel, readers may find themselves laughing — in surprise and delight — at the way Smith takes a literary trope and riffs on it until she's turned it inside out.
