Seasonal Quartet, I argue, offers an instructive limit case for contemporary fiction’s struggle to gain critical purchase on its socio-economic present as the extreme topical proximity of Smith’s novels to the moment of their writing runs the risk of devolving into mere up-to-dateness and fails to produce a sustained critical understanding of the deeper structural sources of socio-economic vulnerabilization. This chapter suggests that Smith’s presentist attention to the now produces a peculiar blindness. Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet-consisting of Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2019), and Summer (2020)-has been celebrated for its attempt to chronicle “in real time” the messy unfolding of Britain’s political and social present.
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