When the book club read Autumn, they summarily dismissed it, but I experienced the novel as a rare instance of aesthetic sublimity, as the right book at the right time.Įventually, I stopped going to book club.
It's in this context that I first grappled with Ali Smith's fiction, with her faith in chance encounters and in the shared languages facilitated by art, with her belief that sharing anything and everything but especially our deepest experiences of revelation, might provide a possible way forward in our networked and increasingly siloed world. Instead, stumbling upon what I thought was only a fabled corner of New York, where the confidently successful read serious fiction over intentionally prepared food and well-selected wine, felt like a kind of arrival. But enchantment, a lightly perceptible frisson akin to standing before a much-photographed painting or skyline, beat out any first blush of awkwardness. As the newest member, I was easily the odd person out, the person most distant from whatever synergy there was that kept the club meeting consistently for years. Serendipity dropped me onto an Upper East Side studio couch, and for many months after, I found myself crowded in amongst a cohort of longtime friends.
I first read Ali Smith's Autumn in book club.
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