Look At You is a curious thing: an autobiographical novel told in short stories, each a snapshot of a moment in the narrator’s life.
The stories are arranged chronologically, and each is a portrait of someone in her orbit: a childhood friend, a parent, a lover. Her alcoholic father visits on Christmas and fights her mother’s new boyfriend. A teenage game of cards in Trinidad ends with her friend hooking up with her brother while a hurricane rages outside. Her father is diagnosed with cancer, and she flies back to help him order the house.
Through these impressions, stretching from early girlhood to middle age, we begin to sense the fullness of her life. Smyth’s narrator is easy to care for because she possesses an essential joie de vivre, flinging herself toward experience with arms wide open, embracing chaos and beauty alike.
Despite the originality of its form, the novel never feels experimental or self-consciously avant-garde in the way genre-bending works sometimes do (think Maggie Nelson or Anne Carson, who similarly push memoir’s boundaries). In fact, the prose is traditional – simple and descriptive.
Ali Smith’s cover blurb calls Smyth an heir to Jean Rhys, and the comparison is apt. Both are glamorous, hypersensitive women who grew up in the Caribbean before being dispatched to gloomy England, where their real troubles begin. But the resemblance rests somewhere deeper: in their genius for atmosphere. Beneath their apparent simplicity lies something complex and very haunting.
Look At You is full of images that seem plucked from dreams: “From there I could see the refinery, the burning lilac flame. I could see the dark green places full of clumps of bamboo. I could see the shimmering lake and the brown bank where vultures made a black crowd. Before we hit the water, we yelled out our names or the name of someone famous who we’d like to be.”
These snapshots of memory illuminate brief moments, but the novel’s power also lies in what Smyth leaves unspoken. Between the stories lie absences – darkened spaces where crucial events unfold in silence: deaths that alter relationships, betrayals that fracture trust, and chance couplings that reshape families and fates. Look At You captures the shadows that define a life, but also the life itself – fiercely lived and fondly remembered.
