Beware of Family Members Bearing Gifts

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WINTER
By Ali Smith
336 pp. Pantheon. $25.95.

There’s something about novels in trilogies, tetralogies and beyond that gives them a certain allure. It’s not the allure of deathlessness, precisely, but maybe the next best thing: delay. We know from the start — whether reading the first in a multivolume set or whether further books have merely been announced — that the disappointment in having to exit the world of this novel will be postponed, that the can will be kickable down the road. The Scottish writer Ali Smith has just published the second of four novels that are being called a seasonal cycle, and there is much to celebrate in this fact, though the allure here (at least so far) is very different from that of other “sets.”

It’s not that the reader is in the same place, or with the same main characters. (The seasons, in real life, barely resemble one another, so why should these books?) But shifting from “Autumn” to “Winter,” and then plunging on through the rest of the year, Smith is the one doing the telling, which means the books can’t help connecting through various channels, most notably her vast supply of preoccupations. Of course, all writers have preoccupations, refrains, obsessions; and by using the seasons as a thematic tarpaulin that covers the whole enterprise and publishing the volumes in fairly quick succession (“Autumn” appeared here last February) with some exciting, punctuating overlaps, she allows the books to exist at once separately and in comfortable relation.

“Winter” opens with the world’s temperature being taken. “God was dead: to begin with,” Smith writes, riffing on the opening of “A Christmas Carol.” “And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theater and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead.” The catalog goes on and on, branching out to include some not-dead, or at least not-yet-dead things. The effect is as if Smith is peering down into the interior of a shaken-up snow globe.

The narrative quickly narrows, homing in on a large house in Cornwall where, on the day before Christmas, an older woman named Sophia Cleves sits in the presence of the disembodied, suspended head of a child. The head never speaks, it just hovers, bringing to mind Freud’s instruction about a psychoanalyst needing to listen with “evenly suspended attention.” (In fact, there are several references to Freud in “Winter.”) By opening in this dislocating way, then moving back into Sophia’s adolescent past and returning to the present in a droll bureaucratic scene at a bank — where Sophia is a “Corinthian account holder, which meant her bank cards had a graphic on them of the top of a Corinthian pillar with its flourish of stony leaves, unlike the more ordinary account holder cards which had no graphic at all” — Smith alerts us early on to the enormously expansive free-range of her vision.

Sophia’s son, Art (whose name is no accident, since this book examines the meaning and use of art in a world like ours), soon arrives, accompanied by a Croatian-Canadian named Lux, impersonating his longtime girlfriend, Charlotte. The sitcom trope is deposited lightly: Smith is comfortable with the setup, just as she is with her pop culture references. She seems genuinely interested in them because she is interested in the entire culture and its shifts, both glacial and volcanic.

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After Lux decides that Sophia’s estranged, longtime political activist sister, Iris, should be called, the “action” of the novel can be said to begin. But action is a subjective word. For a writer like Ali Smith, the exploration of consciousness itself constitutes satisfying action. So the book, which uses “A Christmas Carol” as one of its organizing principles (“Cymbeline” also appears as a reference), at times leaps from era to era, often with surprising bursts of joy.

Along the way, there is much wordplay — “What’s a carapace? It’s a caravan that goes at a great pace.” “I said to your aunt last night. … Art is seeing things. And your aunt said, that’s a great description of what art is” — and a freight of literary and artistic allusions. As in “Autumn,” a female artist becomes one of the novel’s many subjects. Last time it was the pop artist Pauline Boty and this time it’s the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who provides one of the epigraphs — “Landscape directs its own images” — and whose work figures in a section that subtly and satisfyingly links “Winter” to its predecessor.

But where there’s art (at least in this book) there’s suffering, and politically passionate Iris is the one to draw our attention to injustice: “Tell them about what torture does to a life, what it does to a language.” A couple of the protest descriptions feel dutiful, though everywhere else Smith is routinely brilliant, knowing, masterful. Here’s an interlude with Art: “He thinks about how, whatever being alive is, with all its pasts and presents and futures, it is most itself in the moments when you surface from a depth of numbness or forgetfulness that you didn’t even know you were at, and break the surface and when you do it’s akin to — to what? To a salmon leaping God knows where, home against the flow, not knowing what home is.”

The first two books in Smith’s quartet process and employ news items with speed and precision. “Autumn” was considered a Brexit novel, and “Winter” includes references to the presidency of Donald J. Trump and the worldwide women’s marches. It also uses Nativity scene/no-room-at-the-inn ideas to address the hateful rejection of immigrants now on display. In the past, the kind of books that came out shortly after real-world happenings might have had as their subjects, say, events like the Jonestown massacre, to satiate immediate reader need.

There is an immediate reader need here too: We need someone to process and evaluate our political and cultural moment, but it should be someone who is unflinching in the face of bleakness and has great reservoirs of interest in and knowledge of the past. And it helps if that person is extremely funny and seriously angry and experimental and heartbreaking, but never sentimental. And if she’s someone who loves the strange power of language. “ ‘In her ga-what?’ Lux says. ‘Galoshes,’ Art says. ‘What a fine word,’ Lux says.”

All multibook “projects” have a kind of ambition and grand vision, but they must also function close up, book by book, chapter by chapter. That is true of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s work. (He is writing his own seasonal quartet, having just published “Winter.”) While Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, looked at in the aggregate, are a way to understand family trauma, Smith seems to be using her cycle as a way to process the larger trauma of our breaking, swirling world — over time, over human moments, over seasons. Each novel will give her a new chance to inspect her preoccupations in a different light. In “Winter,” the light inside this great novelist’s gorgeous snow globe is utterly original, and it definitely illuminates.