Winter by Ali Smith

No, I have not reached the end of my Oscar watching extravaganza reviews.  There are more movies than days it turns out, but it is time to take a very short break from movies in order to say something about a book.  This is the second of Ali Smith's seasonal series, and while there are lots of similarities with Autumn in terms of fragments of the story told finally coming together into a coherent end, there is also an underlying bitter narrative of the current state of the Western world, it having taken a giant step backwards in the past couple of years.  Having a successful and popular black president apparently upsets the apple cart.
It’s Sophia Cleves, a very successful retired businesswoman in her sixties, who owns the sixteen bedroom baronial mansion, Chei Bre (Cornish for “house of the mind”). It’s the “dead of winter,” the season characterized as “an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again.” Sophia invites her twentyish-year-old son, Arthur, and his girlfriend, Charlotte, for dinner and an overnight stay to celebrate the holiday. The only problem is that, unbeknownst to Sophia, Arthur and Charlotte are estranged and he has hired a 21-year-old Croatian, Lux, to pose as his girlfriend for $1000.  Lux is a stroke of genius for Art.
Sophia is also dealing with a long estrangement from her older sister, Iris, a radical activist. When Arthur and Lux conspire to invite Iris to the family gathering, the “doors of reminiscence” creak, squeak, open and shut in a series of calamitous clashes of class, culture, and recriminations which culminate in a series of bombshell revelations of family secrets.