CAMBRIDGE, England — One of the two separate but not separate narratives of Ali Smith’s mind-bending new novel, “How to be both,” begins when the mother of a girl named George says something during a car trip.
But. ... “Not says,” Ms. Smith then writes. “Said. George’s mother is dead.”
The
conversation continues, the mother gone but not gone, at least not in
George’s memory. And so we are thrust into a story that is really a
palimpsest of stories that fit over and around each other, one about the
life of a young girl in contemporary England, and the other,
incongruously but somehow not incongruously, about a fresco painter in
Renaissance Italy.
The
book’s audacious structure and grand themes — the slippery nature of
time; the connectedness of past, present and future; the fluidity of
identity; the yearning to be understood and remembered, to understand
and remember — might have made it too tricky, too clever, too cold.
Indeed, some readers might prefer their narratives to be more linear.
But “How to be both,” which was on the shortlist for this year’s Man
Booker Prize and recently won the 10,000-pound (about $15,700) Goldsmiths Prize,
given to fiction that “opens up new possibilities for the novel form,”
has beguiled readers as much for its tenderness as for its
experimentalism.
“One
of the things she does so well, and that is particularly evident in
‘How to be both,’ is the way she can create an extremely sophisticated,
complex, multileveled novel that reads beautifully,” said Erica Wagner, one of the Booker judges. (Ms. Smith’s book, she said, came in a close second to the winner, Richard Flanagan’s “Narrow Road to the Deep North.”) “She has always wanted to tell a good story but also to question the methodology of storytelling.”
Ms.
Smith’s books include short stories, works of nonfiction and five
previous novels, two of which were also shortlisted for the Man Booker.
She tends to take the everyday, toss it around and throw in unexpected
elements, underpinning even the biggest idea with a deceptively simple
writing style — what Ms. Wagner described as “this light, playful,
accessible voice that whispers in your ear.”
The spirit of a girl who tumbled to her death in an elevator shaft clings less and less tightly to the world she left behind (“Hotel World”); a mysterious stranger upends a family during a vacation (“The Accidental”); a man turns up at a dinner party, locks himself in the guest room and refuses to leave (“There but for the”).
Ms.
Smith’s writing is inventive and delighted. She cannot help being
exuberant, even on a topic as potentially dull as how to get to her
house from the train station.
“It
looks like a driveway,” she said by email in September, speaking of her
road, tucked away in a quiet corner of Cambridge. “Turn right onto it
and knock on the door of number 6. Hello!”
The
directions were good, the hello repeated at the beginning of an
interview a few days later. Ms. Smith, 52, opened the door to reveal a
jumble of an office decorated with towers of precariously stacked books.
She shares it (and a house a couple of doors down) with her longtime
partner, the filmmaker and artist Sarah Wood. She was dressed in faded
jeans and an old work shirt, with shortish dark hair falling straight
around her face; she seemed too friendly to be so erudite.
“The
book was about observation and what we see and don’t see when we look,
and I had a notion that it should be about time,” Ms. Smith said of “How to be both,”
which Pantheon is publishing in the United States on Dec. 2. She had
been intrigued by the frustration that José Saramago describes in his
book “The Stone Raft” about the difficulty of expressing in novels how
time is experienced in real life.
“He
is annoyed by the fact that you can’t do simultaneity in fiction,
because one thing has to follow another,” she said. “He is brilliantly
funny at holding forth furiously, saying, ‘Why in narrative can’t I show
things that are all happening at once?’ ”
Ms.
Smith wrote about 100 pages, was not very happy with them and then
began reading about frescoes in a 1969 book she found at the charity
shop where she sometimes works as a volunteer. One illustration showed
two layers of a fresco — an early, underneath version with a boy and a
woman; the final version with just the woman, the boy having been
painted over.
“It
struck me as a great metaphor for how narrative works,” she said.
“Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more — the
thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are
invisible.”
Ms.
Smith tossed aside most of what she’d written and began again. The
result, “How to be both,” comprises two discrete narratives that can be
read in either order and, in fact, are published that way — half the
printed books begin with one story, and half with the other.
“I
wanted it to be so if you did swap the stories, the stories would be
self-standing, but each way around would deliver you a different take,”
she said.
One
story is about George and what happens after (and before) her mother’s
death. The other gives a mostly fictional account of the nonfictional
quattrocento painter Francesco del Cossa,
whom Ms. Smith first came across in a copy of Frieze, the art magazine.
She has given him a rich history and switched his gender; her del Cossa
is a woman living as a man, part of her greater point about the
fluidity of identity.
The
novel’s two halves come together, glide apart and reconverge: George
goes to the National Gallery and sees a del Cossa work; del Cossa’s
spirit emerges in the modern world and finds itself following around,
and worrying about, George.
Ms.
Smith came to writing in a roundabout way. She and her four siblings
were raised in Inverness, in the far north of Scotland; her father was
an electrician, and her mother a bus conductor. She fell in love with
books via “Charlotte’s Web,” transfixed by the dramatic effect that
Charlotte’s web writing — “Some Pig,” “Radiant,” “Terrific” and “Humble”
— had on the fate of Wilbur the pig. “It’s about words and the power of
very few words,” Ms. Smith said.
Resisting
her parents’ nudges toward law (“I would have been a rubbish lawyer”),
Ms. Smith studied English at the University of Aberdeen. She graduated
with the highest grades of anyone in her department, won a scholarship
to Cambridge, became a teacher, did not like it, fell ill with chronic
fatigue syndrome and then began writing fiction.
The
“both” in her title means many things. Being both alive and not alive.
Being both male and female. Living in one place but also another.
Experiencing the present and the past and the future all at once.
“The
world asks us to be quickly readable, but the thing about human beings
is that we are more than one thing,” Ms. Smith said. “We are multiple
selves. We are massively contradictory.”
And
“How to be both” also means that “we unite our opposites,” she
continued. “You can’t be one thing without being, in some ways, the
other thing. It’s about how to reconcile, how to be tolerant of all the
possibilities, to recognize how fine it is to be us and to be in the
world.”
