How to be Both, by Ali Smith

“Double Image.”

In How to be Both, Ali Smith explores gender, a subject of intense inquiry in twentieth-century humanities.  Feminist philosophers like Judith Butler have demonstrated the performative quality of gender categories, which operate like stage conventions (e.g., blue is for boys, pink is for girls), and more recent trans critiques blow open the malleability of biological sex itself.  To get at these themes, Smith uses the history of art as a point of departure.

In keeping with the questioning nature of her subject, Smith adopts an experimental approach to story structure.  In the first half of the book, we follow the teenage travails of language prodigy George, whose mother, economist-turned-early-internet-hacktivist Dr. Carol Martineau, has died of a mysterious illness.  Prior to her passing, we find out that Carol had a flirtation with another woman named Lisa, who at one point kissed her.  For her part, George (short for “Georgia”…foreshadowing), befriends popular girl “H,” who rescues George from bullying and the pair become inseparable.  Romantic tension builds between George and H until H’s family moves overseas from Cambridge, U.K., and their passion remains unrequited.

In the second half of the novel, the POV switches to first-person present tense, and narratorial duties shift to a disembodied spirit of 15th-century artist Francesco del Cossa, who made an irony-rich fresco that George studied with H for school.  As Francesco alternates anachronistic observations about George with reminiscences of the past, we discover that Francesco is in fact Francesca.

Smith thus dives into the identity politics fray.  Although she does not mention it, the book owes a debt to art historian Linda Nochlin’s “seminal” (irony intended) 1971 essay, “Why have there been no great women artists?”  Nochlin argues that artistic potentiality abounds in female hands across time, but why should the lack of women-wrought exemplars surprise us, given that women faced barriers to success, from opportunities to study art to commissions?  Virginia Woolf makes the same point.  How would a woman of talent in the past go about going to art school (or writing, or science) if she wanted to?  Moreover, tastemakers have not curated women artists qua masters, so the problem becomes one of circular logic: if we would name women artistic masters as masters, why then, we would have women masters!

Nevertheless, the talented have proven resourceful.  How many women achieve virtuosity in art and then lurked in the chiaroscuro shadows of their male counterparts?  For example, one theory suggests that August Rodin’s mistress, Camille Claudel, might have made many of the pairs of hands in the maestro’s sculptures, unattributed.  Francesca perhaps alludes to this famous case study when she confides,

“Myself I went out of my way, then, to be expert at the painting of hands and be good at the grinding of blue and the using of blue, both : there were others like me, painters I mean, who could do my particular both : we knew each other when we saw each other, we exchanged this knowledge by glance and by silence, by moving on and going our own ways. : and most anyone else who saw through the art of what some would call our subterfuge and others our necessity graced us with acceptance and an unspoken trust in the skill we must surely possess to be so beholden to be taking such a path.”

We’re talking about art, right, or are we discussing gender performance?  But see, the conflation of art with life makes Smith’s whole point.  Francesca finds a way to embody “the bareness and the pliability it takes, ho, to be both [genders].”  As an androgyne, the female artist seeks invisibility, which obviates the path the greatness.  S/he cannot become a cult-of-personality like Picasso, since she’s wearing a disguise.  At best, she emerges as a drag king, a figure of camp, a knock-off of a 19th-century “breeches role” actress like Sarah Bernhardt, who titillated audiences with the latent eroticism of her interpretation of male “parts” (again, irony intended) like Hamlet.  Female artists can only reach success by becoming masculine, a seeming contradiction.  Nevertheless, to avoid the “less than” trap on the one hand, and obscurity on the other, they must learn to become “both”—hence the title.

So much for theme.  On the level of style, Smith writes like the Millennial author she is.  The setting takes place in the early days of smartphones and George learns the facts of life from watching internet porn on her iPad as a tween, and “barely legal” smut at that.  The font on the book’s pages appears large, maybe to accommodate screenagers’ shrinking attention spans.  The typesetter also choses left justification, like an extended text message.  George uses “literally” as an intensifying adverb until Francesca takes over the script and employs “cause” for “because”, literally three times a page cause that’s how the young people talk.

I like George.  How many sixteen-year-olds correct their academic mother’s spoken grammar?  Still, in the end, nothing happens.  George never consummates her relationship with H.  She does not achieve any goals.  She does not overcome any obstacles.  She does not appear to come to any realizations.  Her half of the book raises questions that the book does not answer, and for the second half, Frencesca watches.

Oddly, the most compelling part of the book takes place in a brothel.  Francesca’s contemporaries know the truth about her gender but choose to suspend their disbelief.  In particular, Francesca’s childhood friend Barto, who is in love with her (as a him), takes Francesca to a house of ill repute to introduce her (him) to the feminine mysteries as a birthday present.  Like Barbara Streisand in the movie Yentl, Francesca panics as her same-sex companion undresses.  Francesca asks the high-priced prostitute if she might sketch her instead of touching her, and afterwards lets the exhausted sex worker sleep through the night.  Francesca gives the prostitute her drawing to keep.  As time goes on, the women working in the brothel ferret out Francesca’s secret.  Far from finding her gender-bending act scandalous, they compete with each other for the artist’s attentions.  In fact, the prostitutes pay Francesca for the privilege of having sex with her, an arrangement which also includes sleep, as well as renderings of them from an emerging artist of obvious talent.

In sum, the invisibility of women in art offers a riveting subject for fiction.  Smith makes interesting compositional choices, and her two female misfits complement one another.  The book lands far from bad, but if you’re interested in hermaphroditic fictionalization, Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, about intersex identity, is a special book. More than one book can explore a genre, but Middlesex is hard to compete with.  If you can’t be both, read Eugenides.