This lively, moving narrative is filled with such details, with historical and musical lore and, above all, with puns. All the likable characters in “There but for the” enjoy a good verbal game, most happily with someone else. It is as though playing with language is what enables them to make their way through a complicated world. It’s a knack that might also be picked up, most enjoyably, by reading Ali Smith.

This is why I … hmm … ruminate. In dragging out this tedious, dated conversation – our only insight into Miles’s actions – is Smith trying to make the reader feel what Miles felt? Is it satire? Are the other guests merely symbolic of the world’s evils? Smith is a deeply moral writer who can’t always resist moralizing, but the truth is the job of revealing truth is better done with rounded, surprising characters, such as Michael Smart in The Accidental – the student-bonking professor who teaches a seminar on cliché – and not these wearying stereotypes.

But everything else I expect from Ali Smith, and love, is here: the helium quality of her prose, its playful grab-bagginess (it includes a pair of cryptic stories separate from the main narrative, as well as instructions from the author to the typesetters), how she manages to write so lightly about subjects that are by no means trivial – time, memory, history and their relationship to language. And also what perhaps sums up her whole oeuvre, from her novels to her many collections of highly inventive short stories, the long answer to this short question: “What’s the point of human beings? I mean, what are we for?”

In her new novel, There but for the, Ali Smith deploys the conceit to satirise contemporary culture – and to ask difficult questions about history, time, epistemology and narrative. The result is a playfully serious, or seriously playful, novel full of wit and pleasure, with some premeditated frustrations thrown in for good measure.

Symbol alert! Ali Smith’s new novel opens with a perplexing prologue: a story within a story about a man on an exercise bike whose eyes and mouth are covered by what look like mailbox flaps....The plot borrows a device Ms. Smith, a Scottish author who has been shortlisted for both the Orange and Booker prizes, used in an earlier novel, “The Accidental,” in which a stranger invites herself along on a family’s summer vacation...Yet there is a thematic point to all this showing off, or to most of it, anyway. “There but for the” is ultimately a book about loss and retention: about what we forget and what we remember, about the people who pass through our lives and what bits of them cling to our consciousness.