Churchyards, highlands, a cruise of the Loch Ness, bookshops, grocery stores, train stations, caves, cemeteries, backyards, and parents’ houses. These are some of the places writer Ali Smith brings to life in her third collection of short stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories. And if the settings weren’t varied enough, consider the tales that take place within-performance art, the life-cycle of the common housefly, getting struck by lightning, the strangeness of cellphone culture, ghostly bagpipers, dead parents, apple trees, ants that farm aphids, and naturally, love. Smith has an eye for the humanity found even in the most bizarre, ephemeral, and just plain strange.
Smith’s prose is tight and clever, sweeping through moment after moment of what seems at first to be unrelated subject matter, only to tie everything back together in the end. ‘The Universal Story’ begins with a man in a churchyard, moves to a woman in a bookshop, to a fly on the wall, then to a man trying to buy every copy of The Great Gatsby in Scotland. By the end of the story, we are reading about a woman who builds boats out of things that boats are not usually made of, in this case, copies of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
In another story, ‘Paradise,’ we are treated to the hopes and dreams of three sisters living in Inverness, still reeling from their parents’ death. Kimberley is working the night shift at a local fast-food restaurant, Gemma is a cruise assistant for a sightseeing company on the Loch Ness, and Jasmine is drunk in the cemetery breaking liquor bottles over their parents’ grave markers. Smith styles her writing to reflect the girls’ inner monologues, as the story leapfrogs back and forth through the twilight of a midsummer’s night.
With seamless transitions between points in her stories, Smith manages to weave together bits of Scottish folk tales, popular culture, and trivia into a sometimes funny, often poignant skein. The stories don’t unfold in the conventional narrative sense, but instead they are more apt to expand, or take a circuitous route through uncharted territory, chance connections, or hidden associations. Smith’s major achievement is that nearly all of her stories work on two levels at once, so that they’re fun to read on the surface, while underneath there’s the playfulness and complexity of structure that will please those who fancy themselves to be among the literati.
