What to Read: Hotel World by Ali Smith

I just got a copy of The Whole Story: And Other Stories by Ali Smith. I've been reading these charming, occasionally breath-taking tales when I'm between novels. Smith is a lovely writer, and she wears her art lightly: She's so good that you might not notice just how good she is.

I was introduced to Smith when I read her novel Hotel World a few years ago. It's a wondrous, delightful book. The first chapter is exhilarating, one of the most original, most gorgeous bits of writing I have ever read. Smith's feat is all the more amazing when you consider that she begins her book with the first-person narrative of a young woman's death. The absolute opposite of morbid, this scene is a giddy hymn to existence.

Directly and obliquely, the characters in this novel describe madness, illness, despair, and extinction, and they're all brought together by the death that sets the story in motion. Despite this—or is it because of this?—Hotel World is magnificently, shockingly life-affirming.

Death is a difficult subject for an artist—not because it's so hard to write about, but because it's so easy. We distance ourselves from its reality not just with ritual and bureaucracy, but also with cliché and schmaltz. Smith's novel confronts death with imagination—beyond the fantasy of the opening aria, the dead girl's corpse has its own lingering interred identity—but she doesn't lie.

I interviewed Smith when Hotel World was first released in the US, after it had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in the UK. It was a thoroughly satisfying conversation, brilliant and clever but utterly heartfelt. It was the kind of conversation that makes me fall in love a little.

Interview with Ali Smith

The opening pages of your book are astonishing. Sara, your dead girl, is so gleeful. Her words are like a children's story, filled with nonsensical images—savoring a mouthful of dust, for example—and sometimes bursting into gamboling free verse. How did you decide to turn a character's fatal accident and lingering half-life into a giddy celebration?

Ali Smith: I think the push behind this book is deeply celebratory—of life, its speed, how brilliant and wonderful it is, and a reminder that we have to live it to its and our best, to be our most alive. One of its epigraphs, "remember you must live," is an inversion of the classic memento mori motif. In Hotel World, the impetus, and the reminder, is to celebrate, to live well—that life is short, fast, over too quickly, and that it's so easy to forget how brilliant the sheer unfair drudge of living is. That's why it starts with the playful and liberated, but all-the-time-dissipating, energy of the going soul.

The disembodied ghost is, of course, a familiar entity, but I don't think I've ever read a story in which the body retains a separate personality of its own. What prompted this invention?

AS: Hmm. Good question. I know I was very consciously aware that this would be a book questioning the bindings between the spirit and the material, which is why it's so thematically concerned with social status and class and who has material power and who hasn't. That's how the book first formed—as a social parable about the hierarchical ladder of haves and have-nots. I think it followed from there that the basic place to fracture the physical and the spiritual is the moment of death or the opposition between—open door between—body and soul. One without the other is useless. Without spirit, the body wants nothing to do with anything, just wants to sleep in its box like an present that won't be opened; without body, the spirit is utterly frustrated—it can't feel the ground, can't enjoy the littlest commonplace thrilling sensation anymore.

Sara's shade loses words—and, finally, her name—as she drifts out of the world. Lise and Else have linguistic troubles, too. Sara's body, though, seems to have both vocabulary and memory intact. What's the relationship between language and being in Hotel World?

AS: Language is our means of expressing both potential and communication, and also our means of defining ourselves, pinning ourselves and others down, boxing ourselves and others more closely in. The book, I hope, demands that we fling the boxes open, that we challenge—or even just come to understand—our own means of communicating, even on the most basic level.

The dead girl is perfected, finished. She doesn't have to worry about potential anymore. Her ghost mourns lost language, like it mourns lost color, knowing the brilliant richness that is ebbing away. Else, the homeless girl, from being homeless and lost and ignored, feels that she has no power over anything, that even the words she says are more reduced, less audible or comprehensible than other people's. Lise—ill and caught up in the structures of employment, benefit, and rather bad art that have turned her into a sickly shade of herself—is reduced to corporate jingles and crazy job-speak. Penny, the journalist, is expert at light, linguistic mendacity—something she uses to protect herself at all times. All the people in the novel except for the dead girl are in flux, in potential space, and all are damming themselves—sometimes for safety, sometimes because there's no option—into a less potential space. Language is being: We are the words we use.

Interview conducted February 2002 by Jessica Jernigan. © 2002 Borders, Inc. All rights reserved.