"There But For The," by Ali Smith

British writer Ali Smith’s novel “There But For The” (Pantheon, 2011) is a bit of an “odd duck” of a book, starting with the unusual title. Of course the title brings to mind the saying “There but for the grace of God go I”; this is not specifically referenced in the novel, but the reader can make some connections. Each section of the book is introduced with one of the four words in the title. With a little work, one can tease out the connection between the word and the events in that section, but it is sometimes an obscure one. The story is told in a somewhat nonlinear manner, and sometimes one does not know the intersections among characters until well along in the book. There are also some sections that are told in a stream-of-consciousness style, especially from the minds of two main characters: a young girl and a very old woman. So, in short, Smith does not make reading her novel easy. On top of that, her main plot point -- in which Miles, a man who goes to a dinner party at the house of someone he does not know, goes upstairs and locks himself into a guest room and stays there for some weeks -- risks being gimmicky. However, Smith tells a compelling story, portrays quirky and mostly very sympathetic characters, and writes with wit, authority and absolute control. I felt that the novel was deeply grounded in a great appreciation for the basic humanity of most people. Somehow all these diverse aspects of the novel hang together and make one want to keep reading.