Summer by Ali Smith
Published 2020 · 300 pages · 79,288 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Political Fiction
How hard is Summer to read?
Summer scores 71 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Ali Smith mixes contemporary colloquialisms ('brex-fucked', 'revolutio-lite') with literary vocabulary and the occasional uncommon term ('antediluvian', 'maundering', 'hypotaxis'). She pursues etymological play — the word 'summer' traced to proto-Indo-European 'sam' meaning 'one and together' — but the bulk of the prose is conversational and accessible. This sits above The Great Gatsby in range but well below Gravity's Rainbow's specialized density.
- Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
- Smith's sentences run long and loop through parenthetical asides, lists, and free indirect discourse without conventional punctuation — Sacha's extended interior monologue about the virus scrolls for pages in a near-unbroken stream. The effect is demanding but not hostile: unlike Faulkner's thousand-word compound sentences or James's five-nested-clause constructions, Smith's syntax stays tethered to a speaking voice, keeping it navigable even at length.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- The novel grounds its philosophical reach in concrete contemporary events — Brexit, Australian bushfires, COVID lockdowns, WWII internment — and the abstract surfaces through character dialogue rather than authorial digression. Robert and Hannah trade speculations about Einstein's stone theory and quantum entanglement; the narrator meditates on what the word 'summer' means across time. But these remain anchored in scene and character, placing it closer to 2666's grounded probing than to Waiting for Godot's pure abstraction.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- The text layers historical events (WWII internment at Ascot and the Isle of Man, Brexit, COVID), cultural allusions (Kafka, Dickens, Hannah Arendt, Lorenza Mazzetti, Einstein), and four parallel character arcs within a single novel. Each chapter can shift era, narrator, and register. The density is real but less punishing than War and Peace's multiple plotlines or 2666's encyclopedic forensics; a careful reader tracks the connections without needing a schema.
- Narrative indirection: 70 out of 100
- Connections between the four narrative strands — Sacha, Daniel Gluck, Charlotte/Art, the narrator's reflections on Lorenza Mazzetti — are thematic rather than plot-driven. The reader must infer what each thread means in relation to the others, and Smith withholds explicit connective tissue. This is closer to Flights' demand that readers construct the whole from fragments than to 1984's direct exposition, though the individual scenes are clear and legible on their own.
- Symbolic density: 78 out of 100
- Smith builds a dense symbolic architecture: swifts returning each year to the same nesting site stand for resilience and return; the word 'summer' in its etymological meaning of 'one and together' frames the novel's politics of solidarity; masks, letterboxes, and internment camps echo across historical moments. The Lorenza Mazzetti episode doubles as both historical record and parable of art-as-survival. The symbolism is pervasive and multi-layered, though less totalizing than To the Lighthouse's pure mythic patterning.
- Ironic distance: 70 out of 100
- The narrator's opening riff on 'so?' — the fashionable shrug of political indifference — establishes a sustained ironic stance toward contemporary apathy. Robert's provocations (parroting far-right talking points as 'pragmatism') function as dark satire requiring readers to read against the literal argument. The gap between what characters say and what Smith means is consistently present but gentler and more politically directed than Nabokov's aesthetic entrapment or Pale Fire's derangement.
- Resolution withholding: 82 out of 100
- No narrative strand reaches conventional closure: Daniel Gluck's wartime story fades into an old man's fragmentary memory; Sacha and Robert's political trajectories remain open; Charlotte's paralysis during lockdown ends on a small movement rather than a resolution. The novel ends mid-arc for its characters, trusting the reader to hold the thematic echo. This is more closed than Infinite Jest's radical anti-resolution but more open than genre fiction, closer to 2666's deliberate resistance to finality.
- Structural complexity: 72 out of 100
- Summer interweaves four distinct narrative threads across multiple time periods (1940s internment, 2019 Brexit, 2020 COVID lockdown), shifting POV, register, and narrative mode — epistolary chapters, film-essay digressions on Lorenza Mazzetti, interior monologue, and free indirect discourse all coexist. This is considerably more demanding than a straightforward novel but falls short of Flights' 116 discontinuous fragments or Ulysses' episode-by-episode stylistic reinvention. The threads are coherent in isolation; the challenge is assembling the whole.
How Summer is regarded
Summer holds a literary regard score of 58 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.