WINTER

By Ali Smith

336 pp. Pantheon. $25.95.

There’s something about novels in trilogies, tetralogies and beyond that gives them a certain allure. It’s not the allure of deathlessness, precisely, but maybe the next best thing: delay. We know from the start — whether reading the first in a multivolume set or whether further books have merely been announced — that the disappointment in having to exit the world of this novel will be postponed, that the can will be kickable down the road. The Scottish writer Ali Smith has just published the second of four novels that are being called a seasonal cycle, and there is much to celebrate in this fact, though the allure here (at least so far) is very different from that of other “sets.”

It’s not that the reader is in the same place, or with the same main characters. (The seasons, in real life, barely resemble one another, so why should these books?) But shifting from “Autumn” to “Winter,” and then plunging on through the rest of the year, Smith is the one doing the telling, which means the books can’t help connecting through various channels, most notably her vast supply of preoccupations. Of course, all writers have preoccupations, refrains, obsessions; and by using the seasons as a thematic tarpaulin that covers the whole enterprise and publishing the volumes in fairly quick succession (“Autumn” appeared here last February) with some exciting, punctuating overlaps, she allows the books to exist at once separately and in comfortable relation.

“Winter” opens with the world’s temperature being taken. “God was dead: to begin with,” Smith writes, riffing on the opening of “A Christmas Carol.” “And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theater and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead.” The catalog goes on and on, branching out to include some not-dead, or at least not-yet-dead things. The effect is as if Smith is peering down into the interior of a shaken-up snow globe.

The narrative quickly narrows, homing in on a large house in Cornwall where, on the day before Christmas, an older woman named Sophia Cleves sits in the presence of the disembodied, suspended head of a child. The head never speaks, it just hovers, bringing to mind Freud’s instruction about a psychoanalyst needing to listen with “evenly suspended attention.” (In fact, there are several references to Freud in “Winter.”) By opening in this dislocating way, then moving back into Sophia’s adolescent past and returning to the present in a droll bureaucratic scene at a bank — where Sophia is a “Corinthian account holder, which meant her bank cards had a graphic on them of the top of a Corinthian pillar with its flourish of stony leaves, unlike the more ordinary account holder cards which had no graphic at all” — Smith alerts us early on to the enormously expansive free-range of her vision.