Inner visions

Ali Smith's singular stories offer entry to multiple identities and imaginations

THE FIRST PERSON AND OTHER STORIES
By Ali Smith
Pantheon, 206 pp., $23.95

Ali Smith's new collection is her ninth book in 13 years. Her previous books have been shortlisted for the most prestigious prizes awarded to British Commonwealth writers - the Man Booker, the Orange, the James Tait Black - and her novel "The Accidental" won the Whitbread Award. These are good reasons to get your hands on "The First Person and Other Stories." An even better reason is Smith's fresh, fierce, and risky approach to the short story. Her daring makes the less successful pieces worth the trip, and the strong ones a uniquely exhilarating ride.

The dozen stories collected here are remarkable first of all for their structure, a kind of double (or triple, or quadruple) helix. In each of them, intertwined mini-stories - anecdotes recounted by one of the characters, conversations overheard, vignettes imagined or remembered, dreams, visions - accompany but do not touch one another. The narrator of "True Short Story," recounting an overheard conversation about the purpose of the short story, doles out glimpses of a friend's fight with health officials who are withholding the drug that could arrest her cancer. "The History of History" juxtaposes a stunningly detailed account of the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots with the teenage narrator's attempts to handle her mother's sudden strange behavior. In "No Exit" a bittersweet, middle-of-the-night phone conversation between former lovers pivots on their differing recollection of anecdotes they once told each other. "Writ" describes a conversation between a woman and her 14-year-old self, pitch perfect in its rendering of both the middle-aged narrator's attempts to connect and the adolescent's surly but seductive responses.

Smith's approach to story structure makes demands. All fiction texts, it has always seemed to me, are like a composer's score: They find their full existence only when "performed" in the mind of a reader. But Smith takes co-creation to new heights. It's up to the reader to see - even, sometimes, to forge - the connections among mini-narratives. Sometimes this works; sometimes it doesn't. The strongest stories co-opt the reader so deftly that, before you know it, you're inside the narrator's experience, traveling its multiple paths. In the less successful stories - "Present" and "The Third Person," for example - the Escher-like shifting narrative is a stairway to nowhere.

Smith's style echoes the openness of her structures. There's no mindless lyricism here. "The light is coming down, February, early dusk, and the common is still patchy with snow. . . . It's where they buried most of this city's thousands of plague-dead centuries ago. Beneath the feet of the dogwalkers and the people coming back from the supermarket, under the grass and the going snow." "You stretched and pointed and as you yawned I saw the clean wet insides of your mouth, and your tongue unfurling." Plain but vivid passages like this leave room for you, the reader, to walk in and have a sensory experience for yourself. Smith's language soars into the figurative only in the occasional vividly erotic encounter between two characters whose gender is left to the reader to infer.

Inference, finally, is the name of the game in "The First Person." Perhaps the key to its loose weave appears in the title story. The narrator suspends her account of a long summer day in the life of new lovers to riff on an episode from a 1970s television series called "Tales of the Unexpected" (apparently the British equivalent of "The Twilight Zone"), in which an adolescent girl meets a dire fate at the hands of a "creepy" man and an old woman. Thirty years later, enraged at the way this tale "sacrificed its girl character to a horrible end for the sake of a neat story," the narrator stays up all night "arguing with the neatness and foulness and cynicism of it." Smith allows her heroines to field the problems lobbed at them by life, making inventive use of whatever comes to hand. Even when thrust into the kind of predicaments found in folktales, her women prevail. The narrator of "The Child" finds a baby in her grocery cart; unable to convince the store's staff that the child isn't hers, she leaves with it. It begins to speak in an adult voice, telling politically incorrect jokes (there's a treasure trove of truly shocking jokes here) and demanding access to Internet porn. What can possibly happen next?

Resolutely unsentimental and unresolved, the stories in "The First Person" end, for the most part, in a subtle but discernible upward curve. Twenty-first-century fiction may have moved forever beyond the reach of a happy ending, but a promising present, Smith seems to say - now that's a possibility. The desperately ill friend in "True Short Story" prevails over the heartlessness of managed care, though we don't know whether or not she's cured. The estranged lovers in "No Exit" end their conversation laughing, filled "with hope and sadness both at the same time." The two lovers in the title story cherish their happiness warily. "You're not the first person I've ever felt new with," the narrator tells her companion, listing all the ways this love isn't her first love. Her lover replies with a similar list, ending with "You're not the first person full stop. But you're the one right now."

Ann Harleman (www.annharleman.com) is the author of two story collections, "Happiness" and "Thoreau's Laundry," and two novels, "Bitter Lake" and "The Year She Disappeared."