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Ali Smith’s How to be both, her third Man Booker shortlisted novel, is a dazzling meditation on art and its power in society. Its brilliance is in the careful handling of material, subtly brash, coherent and structured yet enticingly challenging from the offset.
The book is broken into two sections and, though in terms of plot and structure the link is tentative, they mirror each other in terms of theme and issue. The first is a sort of stream of consciousness narrative centred around an adolescent girl grieving her mother amidst the trials and tribulations of growing up, manned by an acutely present and aware narrator. The second is a semi-prose poem written from the viewpoint of a 15th-century painter, virtually unknown save for a single letter written to his patron. Both stories deal with the intense presence of art in society and its function within it.
George, the sharp, grammar-obsessed protagonist of How to be Both’s first section attempts to reconcile her mother’s bizarre secret life and death, in a world she is becoming increasingly disillusioned with. Her narrative deals with concerns of a rapidly evolving contemporary society, a society in which child pornography is happened upon in a browse of curiosity, where teenage girls fetishize the sound of piss, and where the past catches up too quickly with the present; all of this obscured and accentuated by the vicious, unforgiving world of the modern teenager. George is comforted only by the memory of trip to Italy with her mother to see the fresco of a little-known painter, Francesco del Cossa, where their relationship is strengthened through insights into her mother’s secret past. Here also, is where the story of art begins and traces its way backwards through time to the life of del Cossa, writing from the grave on his life, his legacy and his craft. The fresco in the Palazzo Schifanoia (or the Palace of Escaping Boredom) is the frame for this versatile book. The imagined world of 15th-century Italy is shot through a ghostly, formless voice.
Smith operates in small fragments or nuggets. Spots of intense understanding of the realities of our bizarre, macabre world. She seems to effortlessly pinpoint moments of intense reality, be it in awkward exchanges in a classroom or an object’s essence as you bring it to life on a piece of paper, as del Cossa describes in his structureless way. Like brush strokes, Smith’s meta-narrative discusses how language can feasibly fit into a visual framework for, “If things really happened simultaneously it’d be like reading a book but one in which all the lines of the text have been overprinted”. She works through these ideas of language and art merging perhaps most palpably in del Cossa’s section where echoes of Stein’s Tender Buttons become welcomingly apparent. The two separate sections are both entitled “one”, hinting at stories and narrative transcending order and chronology.
Novels about art can be easily tainted by shameful name-dropping (i.e random Eminem and Rumi references a la Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog). The mastery of this book is in the pivotal position of certain works of art to the structure of the story. The selection of cover art for the book (Sylvie Vartan, a nod to her presence in George’s turbulent story) is a testament to this. Ali Smith once again shows that art expressed through language is irresistibly affective or, “That the making of an image is a powerful thing and may, if care’s not taken, lead to breakage,” according to a 15th-century artist.
George claims galleries are not like real life. Smith works through this idea for much of this utterly intriguing, subtly brilliant book. Much of this book’s matter is in the acceptance that both art and life are mutually exclusive, like man and woman. Perhaps equally it aims to forge a link between the two, offering a strong case for the possibility of being both.
