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Across the Page: The First Person, The Sky Below, and Observations

This month’s Across the Page features two noteworthy new releases – Ali Smith’s short story collection The First Person and Stacy D’Erasmo’s novel The Sky Below – and Jane Harris’s Victorian mystery The Observations.

The First Person by Ali Smith (Pantheon)

Ali Smith’s new collection, The First Person, includes twelve unique stories that meditate on the act of storytelling. Five of the stories here are connected and feature an on again/ off again relationship between two unnamed women – “Fidelio and Bess,” “No Exit,” “The Second Person,” “Astute Fiery Luxurious,” and the tender and ultimately redeeming title story, “The First Person.”

The five stories are narrated by one of the women and addressed to the other – or, simply, “you.” The second-person point of view is as direct as it is intimate. Though there is no clear narrative arc, each story reveals a different stage in the women’s relationship.

In “Last Exit,” the narrator calls the “you” in the middle of the night to tell her that she’s worried about a woman she saw earlier that evening at the cinema. The woman, she explains, left through a side door that looks misleadingly like an exit but actually leads nowhere.

Her anxiety is obviously metaphoric. The narrator knows about this door because she and “you” once went behind it to make out – “Don’t you remember?” she asks you and, again, you fail her: “You don’t remember us calling it the fire excite on the way home. You don’t remember anything.”

Throughout the five stories, both women tell each other anecdotes and stories as a way to understand how the relationship dissolved – and, more importantly, why they even care. The other stories in the collection are also about storytelling and myth.

In “The Child,” a woman finds an “embarrassingly beautiful child” in her cart at the grocery store. Everyone around her assumes the baby is hers and after failing to explain she finally leaves with him.

Once the woman and the baby get into her car, he begins to berate her and releases a tirade against anyone who is not white/straight/Christian. When she’s offended, he accuses her of being too politically correct. The baby is full of contradiction – beautiful, arrogant and helpless – which makes their exchange all the more bizarre and enlightening.

In perhaps my favorite story from the collection, “Whit,” Smith takes the idea of storytelling even further when the narrator returns home to find her fourteen-year-old self sitting at the table. The narrator considers giving her adolescent self advice to help her survive the next couple of difficult years, but ultimately decides that these are all moments she needs to experience on her own.

Throughout the conversation, the woman is thinking about a recent kiss she had with a woman lover and it seems that it is this, above all, that she wants to show the insolent teenager: it’s okay, it will all work out.

Each story in this collection captures Smith’s ingenious and absolutely enthralling voice. A highly recommended read.

The Sky Below by Stacy D’Erasmo (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Stacy D’Erasmo’s third book, The Sky Below, is a story of transformation. The novel opens with Gabriel Collins (Gabe) as a dreamy young boy who would rather decorate the Christmas tree with his ballerina mother than play ball with his father.

Gabe is both fascinated by and terrified of the myths his mother reads to him from Ovid, but he is forced to grow up and face his own difficult reality when his father walks out on the family. He imagines that his father always had another family and has now finally picked them over Gabe and his mother and quirky sister.

Eventually the family moves to Brewster, a shabby town down south in Florida where Gabe’s mother gets work managing a motel. But Gabe never really recovers from the upheaval. Instead, he plots to return the family to their beautiful home in Massachusetts by making money selling drugs, prostitution and sneaking into his neighbor’s unlocked front doors to steal odds and ends that he collects in boxes under his bed.

The novel is divided into the different places in Gabe’s life – from his childhood home to the motel in Brewster to a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper East Side to a commune in Mexico. Each place represents a transition similar to the Joseph Conrad collection boxes that later inspire Gabe as a student and artist.

In many ways, though, Gabe remains that young boy from the opening section of the book – a boy trying to find his way home. The last time he was able to feel fully present, it seems, was in his childhood house.

Now, as an adult, he embraces the identity of a drifter, struggling with whether or not he loves his boyfriend and his codependent relationship with his best friend. After receiving life-changing medical news, Gabe becomes more determined than ever to purchase a multi-million dollar brownstone he fell in love with in Brooklyn Heights.

Gabe’s plan is unrealistic and includes everything from blackmail to trying to get his wealthy boyfriend to lend him money. Eventually he lands himself in Mexico in search of his father and it is here that his childhood fantasies from Ovid begin to merge with his adult reality in complex and interesting ways.

The Sky Below is thematically very different from D’Erasmo’s previous novels – A Seahorse Year and Tea, which both feature lesbian characters – but it is equally engaging and thought provoking.

The Observations by Jane Harris (Penguin)

When Bessy Buckley, the irresistible and wry narrator of Jane Harris’s brilliant Victorian mystery The Observations, is hired as a maid at a rundown Castle in Edinburgh, Scotland, she is admittedly confused about why her mistress, Arabella, doesn’t seem to mind her total lack of domestic expertise.

Bessy, however, doesn’t press her luck. An Irish girl who’s just escaped a life of prostitution that began with her mother selling her virginity, she wants to make a new start for herself in Scotland. As it turns out, Arabella, who is working on a book about maids and servants, is more interested in Bessy’s loyalty and her ability to read and write.

Despite Arabella’s odd demands, Bessy gets the loyalty part down quickly as she becomes more and more enamored with her beautiful mistress. In her quest to learn more about the house’s former maid – a woman named Nora who Arabella loved and who was killed by a train accident – Bessy stumbles upon the book that Arabella is writing and discovers unflattering comments about herself.

Bessy is humiliated and enraged by her discovery. To get revenge, she plays a prank that leads Arabella to believe that Nora is either a ghost haunting the house or not dead at all. The prank takes on disastrous results for both Bessy and Arabella from which Harris weaves an absolutely gripping mystery.

In the beginning of the book, Bessy explains that she is writing this account for doctors interested in Arabella’s case. However, some of the more interesting sections of the narrative come when she deviates from this story and reveals her own past – a past which ends up effecting and haunting the present more than she initially realized.

If you like Sarah Waters or Emma Donoghue’s historic fiction, you will definitely enjoy Jane Harris’s The Observations.

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