ABSTRACT
Ali Smith’s fiction demands of its reader some basic requirements. Smith is one of the great contemporary writers of domesticity, and much of her questioning of the nature of human connectedness is set in and around the home. Puns, neologisms, jokes, and metatextual references dominate her stories, but above and beyond this technical attention to the vitality of words, Smith’s writing also emphasises the intimacy of our relationships with books, joyously celebrating them as some of the most significant and fulfilling of our lives. Contemporary society’s infatuation with technology as a means of augmenting human connectedness is a facet of this issue to which Smith has returned increasingly regularly in recent fiction, and without a great deal of optimism. Information technology supposedly offers unprecedented and uninhibited access to data from every spectrum of human experience, yet Smith wonders at the extent to which this allows to know things, and particularly others with any depth.
