If you are tired of puns, are you tired of life? Puns are easy to disdain. They are essentially found, not made; discovered after the fact rather than intended before it. Puns are accidental echoes, random likenesses thrown out by our lexical cosmos. They lurk, pallidly hibernating, inside fortune cookies and Christmas crackers; the groan is the pun’s appropriate unit of appreciation. On the other hand, everyone secretly loves a pun, and, wonderfully, the worst are often as funny as the best, as the great punster Nabokov knew, because the genre is so democratically debased. Puns are part of the careless abundance of creation, the delicious surplus of life, and, therefore, fundamentally joyful. Being accidental, they are like free money—nature’s charity. There’s a reason that the most abundant writer in the language was so abundant in puns: words, like Bottom’s dream, are bottomless.
The Scottish writer Ali Smith is surely the most pun-besotted of contemporary novelists, edging out even Thomas Pynchon. It’s not simply that she loves puns; it’s that she thinks through and with them; her narratives move forward, develop and expand, by mobilizing them. She is an insistently political writer, and her most recent work can be seen as an urgent, sometimes didactic intervention into post-Brexit British animosities, into a world that could be called, to borrow from one of her many punning characters, “nasty, British and short.” Since that calamitous referendum, in June, 2016, Smith has quickly published two novels, “Autumn,” in October of that year, and now “Winter” (Pantheon), the second of a projected seasonal quartet. But, for all the sense of bitter urgency, her work remains essentially sunny (pun-drenched, pun-kissed). “Autumn” and “Winter,” novels full of political foreboding, are also brief and almost breezy—topical, sweet-natured, something fun to be inside. The last page of “Winter” bears a baleful reference to President Trump’s hideous speech to the Boy Scouts in West Virginia, and the book contains a fair amount of family strife; yet the novel ends more like a Shakespearean comedy than like a political tragedy, with an air of optimistic renaissance and familial unity. One of the characters makes a reference to “Cymbeline” that might also function as a description of the novel we have just read: “Cymbeline, he says. The one about poison, mess, bitterness, then the balance coming back. The lies revealed. The losses compensated.” And much of the comedy and the fundamental cheerfulness in Smith’s work has to do, I think, with the figurative consolations the pun embodies: that life is generative, and that, even as things split apart, they can be brought together. For the pun is essentially a rhyme, and rhyme unites.
Is Smith drawn to creating wordy, precocious characters because she is so fond of puns, or do her intelligent characters naturally lead their author toward such wordplay? Certainly, her books contain a lot of high-spirited banter, spoken and thought. Her third novel, “The Accidental” (2005), opens as the preternaturally brilliant twelve-year-old girl Astrid Smart is waking up, and reflecting on her family and the summer holiday they are taking in a Norfolk village. Characteristically, her thought proceeds by way of verbal fission and replication:
I associate this happy, whimsical music, arch in places, with the sound of antique English children’s literature. Perhaps it’s odd to find this old, golden register in the work of a contemporary author, who grew up in a working-class family in the Highland town of Inverness, who is gay, and who often writes about gender, sexuality, and politics. But Smith’s capacious art warmly embraces variety, and creates eccentric stylistic families out of disparate inheritances: “English” whimsy sits easily enough alongside “Scottish” postmodernism; the realistic premises of conventional bourgeois fiction (families on holiday, unfaithful spouses, unhappy children, difficult parents) are regularly disrupted by surreal, experimental, or anarchic elements (time travel, ghosts, digressions, adaptations of late Shakespearean romances, and, in “Winter,” apparitions such as a floating head and a piece of landscape that hangs over a dining table, visible only to one of the characters). Sometimes you finish an Ali Smith book unsure about the final meaning of this variety show but certain that you have been in the presence of an artist who rarely sounds like anyone else.
There are, of course, literary progenitors—you can hear the satirical scrape of Muriel Spark (whom Smith admires), and detect the influence of Virginia Woolf (fluid interior monologue, an interest in artists, and in genderless creativity). But the greatest influence is the writer whom no novelist can either escape or ever really sound like: Shakespeare. As in Shakespeare, especially Shakespearean comedy, everything is mutable. Reality dissolves into magic; men and women swap genders. Words are never stable in Smith’s fiction, because, as in Shakespeare, author and characters are always picking them up and turning them upside down to see what’s going on underneath. “Any the wiser” is flipped, in a moment’s reverie, into King Any the Wiser. In “Winter,” a “carapace” becomes “a caravan that goes at a great pace,” and England’s green and pleasant land becomes “England’s green unpleasant land.” In the same book, a character named Art is the one who sees, at the dining table, a chunk of landscape, just hanging above him, as if “someone had cut a slice out of the coast and dipped it into the room with us, like we’re the coffee and it’s the biscotti.” Art’s friend Lux tells his aunt that “Art is seeing things,” to which she replies, “That’s a great description of what art is.” Samuel Johnson, who created one of the first modern English dictionaries, threatens to merge with the politician and Brexiteer Boris Johnson until Lux helpfully distinguishes them: “The man who wrote the dictionary . . . The opposite of Boris. A man interested in the meanings of words, not one whose interests leave words meaningless.”