Unaccidental
How to Be Both by Ali Smith, excerpt from review published in the Los Angeles Review of Books
“WE DO TREAT books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture,” writes Ali Smith, in Artful, her genre-bending release from 2012. “We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once.” But “books need time to dawn on us” and are:
[…] always in correspondence with the books which came before them […]. You can’t step into the same story twice — or maybe it’s that stories, books, art can’t step into the same person twice, maybe it’s that they allow for our mutability, are ready for us at all times, and maybe it’s this adaptability, regardless of time, that makes them art, because real art (as opposed to more transient art, which is real too, just for less time) will hold us at all our different ages like it held all the people before us and will hold all the people after us, in an elasticity and with a generosity that allow for all our comings and goings. Because come then go we will, and in that order.”
I know it’s bad form to start a review with such a hefty quote but — at the risk of making myself superfluous — the best person to illuminate the work of Ali Smith is Ali Smith. All great books are in correspondence with one another, as she notes, and none more so than her own Artful with How to Be Both, her sixth and most recent novel. Artful can be read as a prequel to How to Be Both, a primer, if you will, on Smith’s creative and metaphysical concerns. A glorious hybrid of fiction and nonfiction, Artful intersperses the story of an unnamed narrator mourning the death of a lover with the texts of four lectures on craft delivered by Smith in early 2012 at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, in which she meditates on grief and form and liminal space, on seeing and being seen, on the nature and meaning of time and art. How to Be Both extrapolates from and dramatizes these meditations, and has just won the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize, a British literary award founded in 2013 to celebrate inventiveness in the novel form, and whose inaugural choice was Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. After Hotel World (2001) and The Accidental (2005), How to Be Both is also the third of Smith’s novels to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and having now read it twice, in both directions so to speak, I’ve decided — and I do not write this flippantly — that Ali Smith is a genius.
