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.
Ms. Smith is a wonderful ventriloquist, adept at throwing her voice into an astonishing array of characters. And while the chapters about the Smart family are written in the third person, she captures their thoughts, their dream lives, their sense of their place in the world with perfect and unwavering pitch … Curiously enough, Amber, the one character written in the first person, is also the one character who never comes alive on the page. No doubt she is intended to be more of a symbol than an individual — a sort of walking human catalyst, meant to stir up other people's lives — but she does not even seem credible in this limited role.
The novel is divided into three sections (‘The Beginning,’ ‘The Middle’ and ‘The End’), each further divided into four parts, one per family member. The considerable charm of The Accidental lies in the way it follows each character's mind for a while, tracing not so much the stream of these people's consciousness as the idling of their thoughts … The awkwardness of the novel's moralizing is all the more disconcerting given its fine, lustrous texture on the page. Smith is a wizard at observing and memorializing the ebb and flow of the everyday mind...The close-up is Smith's forte. Her long shots need a little work.
Not since Sheridan Whiteside inflicted himself on the Stanleys in The Man Who Came to Dinner has a houseguest caused such upheaval in a staid middle-class family … The Accidental has some marvelous characterizations — Astrid is the book's crowning glory — and the writing brims with wit, humor, and energy. Smith gives each character their own style … Amber is first shown as a bright blur in Astrid's video camera, and the question of what she is (ghost? fate? the collective unconscious of the Smarts?) and why she picked the Smarts is never answered. If you're a mystery fan, like me, this is more than a smidge frustrating.
The Accidental...is a simple story—a fable, even—complicatedly told. It begins, literally and disarmingly, with a bang … Smith is a daring acrobat of a writer, and, the better to perform her breathtaking tricks, she has given her book a sturdy structure in the form of three parts...All together these narratives show Smith to be, among other wonders, a master of the use of free indirect style. Hers is the kind of prose in which, as in poetry, every word counts. Line by line, all is taut; there is no slackness anywhere. And no hot air. The effect is enthralling. The prose is full of riffs—real ones … Rich as The Accidental is, I finished it still hungry.
Insofar as Smith has taken a standard dramatic scenario familiar to readers of a certain type of literary novel, she makes some efforts to transcend it. Whether or not it is a successful endeavour is rather more questionable … The Accidental ends up more an exercise in cleverness than a story. Equally, the reader’s enjoyment of The Accidental will be inextricably linked to their appetite for such an exercise. If you aren’t swept away by Smith’s undoubted way with words, and you rely on the bones of the story itself, you will be disappointed.
The Accidental is a thoroughly charming and melodic novel, but you shouldn't let either of those qualities get in the way of its fierceness or its metaphysical precision … Some of the explanation for Smith's satiny accomplishment lies with the authenticity of the voices. Astrid, ‘typical and ironic,’ as she would say, is slightly fey and completely captivating, particularly when she goes from armor-clad to vulnerable. Magnus is a math whiz who breaks the world into acceptable calculations: The world is getting darker, he knows, as a result of pollution and leached-out sunlight the same thing that's happened to his own soul. While the adult Smarts may be less sympathetic, Smith depicts them with such exacting care that you even feel a bit sorry for old lecherous Michael … The novel is small and glistening, one confident little shooting star instead of a cumbersome light show.
Smith gives her highly maneuvered magical-mystery woman some strained religious overtones. Amber's origin is a postmodern, decidedly maculate version of the immaculate conception doctrine. Her mother, briefly mentioned at the start, was equivalently sprite-like … Interesting methods — at times — but terribly pat purposes. The purposes swell up didactically as Amber moves between the ferociously canny and driftily uncanny. (Ayn Rand dips a toe into Garcia Marquez waters). They cut off the novel's breath, and the reader's. Breathing is simultaneously accelerated and blocked by a prose style that ranges between grandiose and convoluted.
Dazzling wordplay and abundant imagination invigorate a tale of lives interrupted ... Inventive, intelligent, playful, Smith has a pin-sharp ear for her characters’ voices. Underneath the glittering surface lies a darker debate about truth and consequences, as well as a magnificent history of the cinema. It’s not so much about the story as it is about the virtuosity of the telling.
