Writer. Contributing Editor at The Discarded Image. Digital Content Strategist. Here's where I publicly explore the books I'm reading, the projects I'm working on, and other current interests. Darkness is Cheap: A Review of Winter
The daffodils are starting to emerge in Northwest Ohio, but I know not to let them fool me. It’s still cold, still mostly gray skies, still swaths of road salt in my wheel wells. Trump is still president, Brexit is still proceeding, and assault weapons are still mowing down schoolchildren. I want to see the #neveragain and the #metoo movements—like those eager daffodils—as harbingers of an awakening. But it’s still winter and “darkness is cheap,” as Ali Smith attributes to Charles Dickens in the epigraph of her latest novel.
Winter, like its namesake, is isolating, chapping, deep. Not much happens on the surface. Just Art and his mother and his mother’s estranged sister and Art’s fake girlfriend spending Christmas together in a huge, mostly unfurnished house in Cornwall. Art and his mother are both seeing things. The mother and the sister are both remembering things. The most revealing conversations take place in the dead of night. Lies on the internet become truth in real life. The characters, and the reader, are disoriented.
I wanted to read Winter because I loved Autumn, the first in Smith’s seasonal cycle. So I picked it up. And then put it down again a few chapters in. It’s so soaked in the zeitgeist of the last couple years that I couldn’t bear it. I found a blanket and a pile of Alexander McCall Smiths and ignored Winter for a couple of weeks.
But I went back to it, hoping for signs of spring. And I found them, as the stranger impersonating the girlfriend begins to thaw the family’s edges. Proximity revives warmth, and they start to feel their extremities again—painfully at first, and then subsiding into cautious comfort.
It’s a strange and beautiful book, perfectly pitched for the season it embodies. It’s a book that wouldn’t have made sense five years ago but will likely stand as a reminder of this moment in cultural time. In January, it was too devastating to read. But now that March has arrived and high schoolers are organizing protests at the White House, it feels warmer.
Hopefully, for fans of Ali Smith, spring is coming.
