How to Be Both by Ali Smith (2014)

The clear first thing to say is that Smith had an epithet for me from page one, which stayed all through the reading of this. She is a natty writer. Meaning that she has a readiness in her, a chatty companionability which contrasts well her occasional stirring qualities, her learning and flexibility. It makes for entertainment. On the other side of the coin, the critical response to this is puzzling to say the least. Is her nattiness also dazzling, mazing, masking? This is two novellas or short novels, which are strongly linked. The first is a young adult piece about a girl / young woman coming to terms with the loss of her mother and dealing, ruefully, with her family (with whom she still lives as she completes her schooling) and with her sexuality. It retails, particularly, a journey which the whole family, including the artist mother before her death, took to Italy to take a look at a fresco. The effect of this painting rains down through all that follows, in its significance for the mother and for the daughter in remembering her. Now, for some reason this has been marketed and published as an adult piece. Not sure why, and I won't set it at Smith's feet - her publishers may have insisted. I think the easiest way to illustrate the issue is to consider a hypothetical: imagine a researcher buys you two gifts from a bookshop, one from the adult section and one from the young adult. They tear the covers and the preliminary pages from each book, and we'll assume they both have no running heads for identification purposes. So you're left with just the two texts and nothing else. Could you tell which one was the adult and which the young adult book? I know I could, and would venture that most intensive readers could do the same. This first novella overwhelmingly has that young adult feeling. Difficult to put it exactly into words, but let's try: a sense of more of the described; a sense of life's full toughness and poetry looming, but not yet fully engaged; a sense of resulting lesser gravitas - a 'staged' quality, for lack of better terminology. And a firm reminder - this is not because the central character is of young adult age. Plenty of adult novels have been written about young characters. This is rather an analysis of tone in the writing. I don't know what the lack of recognition of this signifies. I hesitate to be a doom-monger and say that we're losing our literary critical acuity. But I also hesitate to say that we are just freeing ourselves up, letting our literary hair down, and 'letting everything mingle', in some sort of inane can't-tell-one-thing-from-anotherness, which would be enough to make Edith Sitwell spit chips (appealing though that image might be!). For one thing, that difference, and the gravitas on the adult side of its equation, is something I value. Anyway, this first novella is very enjoyable, and Smith's nattiness and experimental flexibility make it a really strong contender for younger young adults; it discusses grief well, and has playfulness and a certain wiry philosophic strength. The second novella takes us back to somewhere near the Renaissance and the painter of the painting much discussed in the prior novella. This is a strange piece in some senses. Smith has had a decision to make, given what she appears to want. She wants, I think, to make the story readably accessible with modern language, which I guess is fair enough. She also wants to incorporate into it quite a measure of selective experimentation, so as to be able to manipulate the text in an interesting way. There is of course a trade-off for that - and it comes by way of verisimilitude. The further one strays from 'the real' as can be historically understood in those circumstances, the less power one has. The contrast is that the play in it has more flexible warps and wefts. So we get situations that feel "wrong": the painter as a child has problems of understanding, and 'his' (we later find out that actually it's 'her') parents sit down with him and explain in a kind of 70s almost-hippie-helpful kind of way, reminiscent of Oxford-Children's-Library-1973-with-illustrations-by-Victor-Ambrus. We get language and forms of association that are very now. We also get huge selectivity, where, for example, our artist is experimentally transported to our era and watches the girl from the first novella at a gallery, and out in the streets, noticing all sorts of little things about her and things connected with her, and utterly fails to either notice cars, noise, or TV, for example, or to be even slightly frightened by them or anything else in this world of extreme difference. This is not necessarily wrong, because Smith's character can do and see what she wants. But it makes for lesser semblance of reality, and results in the fact that therefore we are funnelled toward Smith's playfulness alone as the reason for being here, reading this, almost like we are being asked 'will you please not expect this to be a realistically created world; will you please just listen to these few things about it?'. This sounds fine, until one considers that an author not asking the reader that has left them free in their imagination, and they're still listening. It's almost like the task wasn't fully compassed by Smith - that experimentation became the cause of the truncator rather than the expander, as one might find for example in the works of Gil Orlovitz, or Penelope Shuttle, or Ann Quin, or.............but, that being said, apart from its being a little overlong, this is again touched by her nattiness. There is plenty here to savour, especially Smith's feeling for colour and prehensile tucking in of philosophic references and art-historical titbits. In the end, I wish this could have been published expressly for young adults, and, in its experiments and liveliness, really impressed them. I hope they find it, despite its adult mask.