Bertie Plays the Blues

Starred review from October 7, 2013
Bestseller Smith's seventh 44 Scotland Street novel (after 2012's The Importance of Being Seven) provides another genial, witty glimpse into the life and times of the denizens of an Edinburgh neighborhood. Seven-year-old Bertie Pollock gets top billing in the title, but all the usual characters figure in the book's many subplots, including Bertie's parents, Irene and Stuart; schoolmates Ranald and Olive; Elspeth Harmony, her husband, Matthew, and their newborn triplets; Domenica Macdonald (now affianced to Angus Lordie); and the proprietress of the local cafe, Big Lou. How will Elspeth and Matthew cope with triplets? Where will Domenica and Angus live? Can Big Lou find happiness through online dating? And on the farcical side, can Bertie orphan himself by auctioning off his parents on eBay? Smith writes soap operas, but for a thoughtful, literate audience interested in the inherent conflict between the moral virtue of civility and the personal desire for happiness. As Angus puts it, there are people who "led the examined lifeâwho questioned themselves, who weighed up what to do, who developed and nurtured the self." They are philosophical but always human, and Smith's great gift is to renderâand reconcileâthat contradiction. Agent: Robin Straus, Robin Straus Agency.

October 1, 2013
Eighty more bite-sized chapters bring curious readers up to date on the latest doings at 44 Scotland Street and its Edinburgh environs (The Importance of Being Seven, 2012, etc.). The headline event, painter Angus Lordie's upcoming wedding to Domenica Macdonald, is threatened on two fronts. First, Domenica wants Angus to give up his place, whose high ceilings make it perfect for his work, and move into 44 Scotland Street, where they can have ample horizontal room if they purchase the adjoining flat, which Domenica's friend Antonia Collie, who plans to take vows as a lay sister in Italy, wants to sell. Then, more dangerously, that same flat throws Domenica together with her old flame Magnus Campbell, and sparks fly between them. More prosaically, Domenica's neighbors Matthew and Elspeth Harmony, exhausted by caring for their new triplets, hire Matthew's ex-girlfriend Pat Macgregor to help at the Something Special Gallery and Anna, a Danish au pair, to help with little Rognvald, Tobermory and Fergus. Their friend Big Lou's online date turns out to be an Elvis impersonator. Overbearing Irene Pollock continues to make life miserable for her husband, Stuart, who affronts her by joining a Masonic lodge, and their son Bertie, the 6-year-old prodigy who's been force-fed yoga, Italian, psychotherapy and saxophone lessons. Bertie's friend Ranald Braveheart Macpherson persuades Bertie to put himself up for adoption on eBay and, when that falls through, to run away from home to an adoption agency in Glasgow, an adventure that produces perhaps the single most promising development since the series began six volumes ago. Even more lightweight and inconsequential than previous installments in its abrupt inflation and deflation of domestic dilemmas. Yet, the neighborhood's legion of fans will devour each chapter and be sorry when they've turned the last page.

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Starred review from November 1, 2013
Bertie is a six-and-a-half-year-old boy in Edinburgh who is so unhappy with his mother-driven schedule of yoga, Italian lessons, and a weekly visit to a psychotherapist that he puts himself up for adoption on eBay. He lives with his well-meaning but weak father and domineering mother in a well-appointed but loveless flat on Scotland Street. This upscale apartment building, the setting for McCall Smith's Scotland Street series, also houses a cultural anthropologist, soon to marry a portrait painter, and it used to hold the gels, ointments, mirrors, and wardrobe used by Bruce, the beyond-handsome narcissist who fascinates the art student Pat (McCall Smith says it's like a cobra fascinating a mouse). The prolific McCall Smith, who also produces the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series and the Corduroy Mansions series, writes the Scotland Street novels in serial form for The Scotsman, appearing daily several months a year. He moves from vignette to vignette within the flat and in greater Edinburgh, always moving his characters' fates forward bit by bit, meeting in the apartment house hallway by meeting at Big Lou's caf' or meeting at the wine bar. The plotlines, now spanning seven novels, are devilishly clever, but readers may well value even more McCall Smith's wit and his characters' conversations and reflections on happiness, loneliness, and love. Often droll, often touching, the Scotland Street stories are always delightful to read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)