This, George has noted, is "exactly the kind of stunt her mother would pull." While you're "waiting and waiting" for "the person you needed" to come back, what you'd get would be "some dead renaissance painter going on and on about himself and his work and it'd be someone you knew nothing about and that'd be meant to teach you empathy, would it?" George becomes obsessed with del Cossa's only painting at the National Gallery in London - where the reanimated artist, wandering in this oddly horseless purgatorium of people affixed to their "holy votive tablets," finds her in the other half of the novel. Still, there's pleasure aplenty in starting over once you've read to an end, guaranteed you'll notice different things. In truth, you can't fully have it both ways because, after reading the contemporary story first (as I did) there's no way to unread it so you experience the historical half with a blank narrative canvas (and vice versa). Like the frescoes it describes, How To Be Both can be approached from both sides the order in which you read the sections subtly changes the emphasis. Others begin with the genre-and-gender-bending tale of an Italian Renaissance painter, a story that could be titled "Art isn't easy." Some copies begin with a contemporary story of a whip-smart English teenager mourning the sudden death of her brilliant, feminist mother. Ingeniously conceived as what her publishers are calling a "literary double-take," the novel is being published in two editions - same cover, but with its two sections switched. Smith, whose books include The Accidental, There But For The, and the essay collection Artful, has outdone herself with How To Be Both. How?Ĭan a book be both linguistically playful and dead serious? Structurally innovative and reader-friendly? Mournful and joyful? Brainy and moving? Ali Smith's How To Be Both, which recently won the prestigious, all-Brit two-year-old Goldsmiths prize for being a truly novel novel, is all of the above - and then some. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.
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