Smokey Barnable is the central character of Little, Big, who, in the opening pages, forsakes his job checking the accuracy of names and addresses for the phone company and sets off on foot to Edgewood where he will marry Daily Alice Drinkwater and thereby associate himself with the shadowy fairy Tale. Smokey believes himself to be a person without character, and only after his marriage to Daily Alice does he come to realize he has acquired one. His marriage has given him entrance into the master plot of the fairy world, and his new character is a kind of gift. Never able to see the fairies and never convinced of their existence, Smokey plays out his part without knowing what it is. His part, however, is by no means insignificant, and at the end of the novel he succeeds in restarting an orrery (a mechanical model of the...