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��It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.��

I find autumn to be my favorite time of year so it was little surprise that Ali Smith’s artistic expression of the season in Autumn would become a favorite book. It is a season that enfolds multitudes of contradictions inside itself, all tumbling about like the fallen leaves in the breeze yet somehow harmonizing the discordance into a bittersweet emotional symphony. It is the season of decay with the days eroding towards dark and cold yet the seasons proclaims a defiant death throe of comforting weather and vibrant colors like ��a second spring when every leaf is a flower,�� as Albert Camus once wrote. Warm days with a crisp underbite. Personally, autumn has always felt like the ideal catalyst for the moments we synthesize as key details in our personal bildungsromans: the start of new school years bringing change and the excitement of new things or, in college years, the season coincides with that first taste of campus freedom and the intense early scenes of a university romance. ��Autumns seem that season of beginning,�� Truman Capote wrote, and these beginnings conflicting with the symbolic endings of the season are a gorgeous contradiction that has always captured not only my heart, but many of the great writers and poets throughout the ages. Jane Austen tells us this in Persuasion, touching upon autumn as:

��that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness �� that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.��

There is a high bar for autumnal expression and Ali Smith not only meets the challenge but creates something that combines the calendar season with a specific sort of political autumn in 2016. Above all, Smith captures the contradictory nature of autumn into a heartrending exploration of what it means to be a person and one person among many. While being rather melancholy in tone, Autumn reads rather playfully as it saunters through prose composed of puns, paintings and political polarization. To speak of a plot seems beside the point as Smith extracts meaning from quotidian moments, creating a collage of images that amalgamate towards an otherwise ineffable impression. Elisabeth,the central character in Autumn writes of of underrecognized British pop artist ’s collage work that ��an image of an image means the image can be seen with new objectivity, with liberation from the original,�� and Smith’s narrative can be viewed as representing autumn in a similar regard. In this way, Autumn catalyzes past and present as well as the personal and political in a deeply moving work where each beautiful sentence fell into my heart like leaves cascading off the trees.

�� The trees are revealing their structures. There’s the catch of fire in the air. All the souls are out marauding. But there are roses, there are still roses. ��

Ali Smith that her Seasons Quartet—a series of books that could plausibly be read as stand-alones or in any order (of which Autumn is the first) though do travel in a thematic movement forward like the passage of time they represent—��would be about not just their own times, but the place where time and the novel meet.�� Time is central to everything here, even in its invisibility, and all the aspects of “past�� and “present�� presented here as the narrative sashays across the timeline seem to find the Brexit referendum as the major hinge between them. It represents not just the dividing line between “before�� and “after�� Brexit, which is something deeply felt in times of historical change just like how the Covid pandemic in 2020 often becomes a reference for “before�� and “after�� (Smith writes about this later in Companion Piece), but also a political dividing line between people. Smith spends several lengthy passages emphasizing this:

��All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked. All across the country, people felt righteous. All across the country, people felt sick. All across the country, people felt history at their shoulder. All across the country, people felt history meant nothing. All across the country, people felt like they counted for nothing. All across the country, people had pinned their hopes on it. All across the country, people waved flags in the rain. All across the country, people drew swastika graffiti. All across the country, people threatened other people. All across the country, people told people to leave. All across the country, the media was insane. All across the country, politicians lied. All across the country, politicians fell apart����

This collective contradictory feeling, this sort of metaphorical autumn or “fall,�� creates an uneasy backdrop to the novel. Smith excels at threading small details as subplots through the story that quietly emphasize this. There is the back-and-forth of graffiti on a wall spitefully telling people to go home and being reminded the UK is their home or the idea of being divided getting a physical manifestation as an electrified fence across the town at which Elisabeth’s mother eventually assaults with trinkets she finds at an antiques shop ��bombarding that fence with people’s histories.�� Though my favorite is the rather humorous paperwork drama that unfolds with Elisabeth assailed by bureaucratic barriers in an attempt to renew her passport. As someone who often has to ask for multiple forms of ID in order to register people for a library card, Elisabeth being unable to provide ID without being able to renew her ID because of specifications that come across as comically absurd was rather darkly delightful to read. But all these details—Smith is extraordinary at writing about nothing, the quiet moments are so cathartically perfect—really add up to dynamically portray the specifics of the moment in time.

��That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it's in their nature.��

Within the larger political is a rather intimate tale of the personal: the friendship between Elisabeth and Daniel which begins when she is a young girl and he, the aging neighbor, becomes a sort of caregiver so Elisabeth’s mother can dodge responsibilities and head out to town. This friendship becomes her sort of coming-of-age narrative, making a home in her heart that will inform the rest of her life. ��The lifelong friends,�� Daniel, already an old man, says to her in her youth, ��sometimes wait a lifetime for them.�� And sometimes it is the absences that speak loudest, with the past of their times together—experiencing art and playing thought and language games that excite and exercise the imagination and often tend to bend towards the political—juxtaposed with the present as she reads to him in a elderly care facility while he remains asleep at the ripe old age of 101. It is a really moving story and as Smith places each piece of their time together into the collective portrait of life the story only becomes sadder yet more beautiful.

��A great many men don’t understand a woman full of joy, even more don’t understand paintings full of joy by a woman.��

The artist Pauline Boty is first introduced to her by Daniel and becomes a symbol within the novel not only for a feminist resistance against a patriarchy that would always try to delegitimize or sweep aside women’s efforts, but also an expression of art forged from political unrest. In this way, Smith ties the story of Boty with that of and the , from which her painting, Scandal 63, became a political statement (the painting has notably ).

Pauline Boty with her painting of Christine Keeler, ‘Scandal 63��

Smith continues this legacy of forming art from the political. It is in the nature of art it seems, adapting and creating as if in refusal to be legislated into silence. Take the word “Brexit�� for instance, a word that didn’t exist until the UK moved to break from the EU but now is a commonly known term: language creates and adapts to meet the times.

��Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about.��

I loved the moments with Daniel and Elisabeth where their word games became political expressions even without her realizing it, such as the incredible scene where Daniel takes Elisabeth’s image of a man with a gun and his with a man dressed as a tree and creates a story representing political oppression and violence against those who deviate from the socially-enforced “norms��. In a way a novel is a rebuttal against the news, particularly in times when people no longer trust the media. ��I’m tired of the news. I’m tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren’t, and deals so simplistically with what’s truly appalling,�� we are told, and a novel is a way to take those same details and organize them in ways that emphasize the emotional undercurrents that are often left out. A way to create a fiction that can do battle with the fictions told by those in power to obtain or retain power. ��Always be reading something,�� Daniel advises, ��even when we're not physically reading. How else will we read the world?�� This is why I find literature to be so important, it helps us read the world.

��I'm tired of the vitriol. I'm tired of anger. I'm tired of the meanness. I'm tired of selfishness. I'm tired of how we're doing nothing to stop it. I'm tired of how we're encourageing it. I'm tired of the violence that's on it's way, that's coming, that hasn't happened yet. I'm tired of liars. I'm tired of sanctified liars. I'm tired of how those liars have let this happen. I'm tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. I'm tired of lying governments. I'm tired of people not caring whether they're being lied to anymore. I'm tired of being made to feel this fearful.��

In times of unrest, a beautiful story can really help us sort out our feelings. It remind me of the lines by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: �� A poem in a difficult time / is beautiful flowers in a cemetery.�� It is in art we can find hope, and hope is important to hold onto.

��Hope is exactly that, that’s all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we’re here for a mere blink of the eyes, that’s all.��

And that is what the season of autumn reminds me of most: hope. It is a season of both endings and beginnings, it is a season of death and decay but it also bursts with color and reminds us to hold on. Winter is coming and we need to hold our inner warmth to get through and, as Smith shows us here, the connections we have with others is the greatest of warmths.

��We have to hope that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters.��

Autumn is a powerful little book, so alive in prose that often feels like it is riffing, so deep in emotions that creep across the page so quietly, and so full of hope and heartfelt joy even in moments of bleakness. I’ve been meaning to read this for a few years and am glad I did it during the titular season, reading it while on a trip through Atlanta all alive in colorful leaves and the warm yet crisp weather of early November. This was an experience of a novel that dug deep in me and Ali Smith is an incredible writer. Once the season turns, I am eager to read the next book.

5/5

��There's always, there'll always be, more story. That's what story is...It's the never-ending leaf-fall.��