Ali Smith loves words. She loves playing with them, calling attention to them, listening to them as if they were members of a vast extended family, each precious in its own right and she their fair-­minded parent, determined not to play favorites. She can give the word “but” such a star turn that you wonder why you’d ever taken it for granted.

Smith’s love of language lights up all her books, a body of work that encompasses four previous novels and four volumes of short stories, and that has garnered prizes including the Whitbread Award in Britain. But (Oh there it is! As one of Smith’s characters says, “The thing I particularly like about the word but . . . is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting”) Smith’s wordplay never comes at the expense of the many other facets in her complicated creations — characters, places, ideas.

Smith’s new novel, “There but for the,” is a witty, provocative urban fable about an unexpected guest who shows up at a dinner party in the London suburb of Greenwich and then, midway through, locks himself inside the guest bedroom and refuses to leave. The novel is divided into four main sections, “There,” “But,” “For” and “The,” though the title phrase is nowhere spoken, leaving us to wonder which “There” Smith is referring to, and whether she intends for her readers’ minds to echo with the phrase “Grace of God Go I” — and if so, which God and, for that matter, which I. Such uncertainties typify Smith’s sly and circuitous method. She is not a writer to seize on if linearity and a clear plotline are what you’re after. On the other hand, if you enjoy surprising, often comic insights into contemporary life, she’s someone to relish.

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