Ali Smith’s There but for the opens with a bizarre and confusing scene: a man on an exercise bike wears mailbox flaps on his eyes and mouth until a young boy appears to remove the mailbox flaps and transform them into a paper airplane.
There are a lot of strange symbols like this scattered throughout the novel; the reader can’t figure it out until much later in the book, and the connections themselves aren’t particularly strong.
The novel as a whole centers on the story of Miles Garth, a man who locks himself in an acquaintance’s house for months after a grueling conversation at a dinner party. This main plot is lost, though, in an endless string of puns that are often overly quirky and clever.
I really enjoyed the parts of the novel that dealt with memory loss and retention – particularly the people who come in and out of our lives and our struggle to remember (or forget) them. All four sections of the novel (one for each word in the book’s title) are told from the perspective of someone who knew Miles Garth, but only in passing. To see their thought processes as they pieced together their memories of Miles was fascinating.
On the whole I liked the book’s message, but not the package that it came in. Though the overuse of cutesy puns and weighty symbols grated on me after a while, I thought Smith’s points of view on memory and language were outstanding. So while I wouldn’t exactly recommend it as a beach read, There but for the will definitely stay with you.