Words in Tension, Words’ Intention: Review of Ali Smith’s Glyph

Bruce J. Krajewski Under Review:Glyph. Ali Smith. Pantheon, May 2026. Perhaps not since the Marx Brothers has the entertaining wildness of language found as welcoming a landscape as in Ali Smith’s recent novels. Glyph follows the celebrated Gliff, a word that Paraic O’Donnell’s review describes as a Scottish one “whose many meanings – among them glance, trace and inkling – take a page and a half to enumerate.” Frequently, in Smith’s work, meaning spills out and over, like the people in the famous packed cabin sequence in A Night at the Opera. Amidst the “talk about the many meanings” of words, in this overabundant atmosphere of multiplying significance, the haunted sisters at the heart of the novel sidestep the usual urge to decide between the real and imaginary by trusting that “matter doesn’t matter.” Invented characters and ghosts matter in the same way flesh and blood does. Smith suggests that abiding with reality also means abiding with imaginary and unverifiable stuff that…