To step back a moment, Ali deserves credit for a great premise. “What if…?’’ is always a fun question to entertain, especially if the rumination focuses on a potent tragedy, a scintillating meltdown, or both. But fiction that speculates on what might have happened to a famous person or event in different circumstances — like Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America’’ or Joyce Carol Oates’s “Blonde’’ — is not friendly to half measures. Those two authors knew it and wrote with a hallucinogenic and reckless imagination. Ali does not. She seems, in fact, to have progressed very little beyond the book’s potentially lucrative conceit, as though the novel were simply a proposal padded out with enough filler to justify a hardcover release. It’s a puzzling maneuver from the prolific and critically acclaimed author, who has collected nods from Granta and penned the excellent “Brick Lane,’’ which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2003. Reviews of Ali’s foray into spritzy commercial fiction have been so universally poor that appalled British critics can be divided into three distinct camps: those who bristle at the book’s premise, those who fault Ali’s execution, and those who find the whole thing, as Charlotte Moore wrote in The Spectator, “a queasy failure of moral and literary imagination.’’ Ouch.
Ali, of course, has insisted that Lydia is a fictional princess, albeit one whose biographical details track those of the late Di. Where the story diverges is at the point of Diana’s demise: The real princess perished in a 1997 car crash, while the character in “Untold Story’’ fakes her death in a swimming accident, renames herself Lydia Snaresbrook, changes her physical appearance and accent, and relocates to a village of 8,000 in North Carolina.
