non-romance romance, #10: How to Be Both by Ali Smith
Study me then, you who shall lovers be at the next world
Welcome new subscribers! Thank you to Smart Bitches, Trashy Books for the recent shout-out, where I think many of you came from. The Big Duke Project will continue in September—what I thought would be a July-only project sprawled into the rest of summer because I keep wanting to gather more data points (read: read more books).
This issue is a part of my monthly series called non-romance romance where I write about something decidedly not a genre fiction romance novel, with romance as a lens. Non-romance romance is newly for paid subscribers, but past (free) examples include The Last of the Mohicans, There’s Always This Year, and War and Peace.
I have two identifiably annoying habits when it comes to how I talk about how media that I love. There are definitely more, these are just the two that I know in my bones about and can’t do anything to change. One is that I will call anything a romance novel. That annoying habit is basically this series. The other one I mostly deploy while watching films. Sometimes there'll be a movie that is so in line with my taste, the pieces of the aesthetic trappings feel so drawn out from my personal history, that I feel like I can’t be objective about it. These are not my favorite movies, necessarily. But movies that upon even first watch, I connected with the ingredients of the film. The annoying thing is that I call this concept “Emma soup.”
For whatever reason, a book rarely signals “Emma soup” to me. Maybe because quite a few of the ingredients of that reaction to a film are costuming and set dressing choices. It’s basically an aesthetic, formal distinction. But How to Be Both by Ali Smith (2014) comes as close to the experience as I’ve had.
I picked up How to Be Both basically the same way that I choose which poem or short story to start with when I read a collection: I ctrl+f’d the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century and looked for ones where the blurbs mentioned Italy. There was The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner, which would probably be my pick for Best Book of the 21st Century (another rare Emma soup book), My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, which I read in Italian last year, and How to Be Both (2014). I’m not sure if I even actually read the blurb before I put a hold on the physical book at my library.
A notable feature of the book, mentioned at the top of every review I’ve read, is how it was printed. The book has two stories, one of a teen, George, in Cambridge, England and one of the 15th century Italian painter, Francesco del Cossa. But rather than alternate between the two perspectives, the book has two distinct parts, labeled by either a little drawing of a camera or a little drawing of the eyes at the front. Half the books printed have the “camera” section first and half the books have the “eyes” section first. Readers on Goodreads will note which copy they read, “camera/eyes” or “eyes/camera” in their reviews.

I went into the novel with nearly no information about the book, other than “set in Italy, but my local library had a “camera/eyes” copy, meaning I got George’s story, than Francesco’s. I only discovered the printing conceit when I noodled around Goodreads to figure out when we would get to Italy; given the option between a moody British teen and a moody Italian ghost, I know where my allegiances lie. I also momentarily assumed that we would going back and forth between the two perspectives, but that is not how the book works. The only going back and forth happens on a scale outside me as a reader.
George life and Francesco’s afterlife do intersect within their own narrative vacuums. George’s mother, who has passed away (insofar as anyone can pass away in How to be Both, where time frequently flattens and compresses) becomes so fixated on a painting by del Cossa that she takes her children to Ferrara to see the Palazzo Schiafonia, or the “palace of not being bored,” where del Cossa worked on murals on the wall. Del Cossa’s real life biographical details primarily come from a letter requesting more payment from the Este family for work on these murals. Smith quotes the historical letter in the epigram of the book: Et ricordare suplicando a quella che io sonto francescho del cossa il quale a sollo fatto quili tri canpi verso lanticamara. (And begging you to remember that I am Francesco del Cossa that alone made those three fields in the antechamber).1
The mother’s impulses frustrate George, given that she knows so little about del Cossa that she forgets the name of the artist the family is in Ferrara, looking at the paintings. George suggests she look up the name on a phone, though this immediately comes with a sense of “guilt and fury.” There’s a sense that the mother lives in the moment in a way that teenaged George resents. But when the mother suddenly dies, George takes up the del Cossa fixation, in a circuitous way. While viewing the painting of St. Vincent Ferrer at the National Gallery in London, George is spotted by del Cossa’s ghost, who seems to have been revived especially to watch the teen. This is where del Cossa’s story begins, watching the back of George’s head, looking at a painting made 650 years earlier.
Del Cossa’s 15th century life unfolds piecemeal, with stutter steps of remembering interrupted by caveats and asides that simultaneously acknowledge and downplay death (the ghost recalling a friend: “we were friends until I died (if I did die ever, cause I remember no death) and I trust that he remembered me lovingly till the day he died himself (if he did, cause I have no memory of such a thing.”) A stonemason father helps del Cossa find a place as a courtly painter, so the ghost is always commenting on the quality of the walls seen around London. Other than the eternal interruptions of remembrances of death, del Cossa’s story is interrupted by observations of George in current day London.
That’s as much I feel comfortable describing what exactly happens in the book. In her review in The Guardian of the book, Laura Miller, who had the opposite order that I did, writes “I can never know what it would be like to meet George before knowing Del Cossa, so that version of the novel is forever lost to me. It's a bit sad. But it was worth it.” In amateur reviews on Goodreads, some people who hated the book guess that they might have enjoyed it more if they had gotten the opposite edition of the book. When I realized I was stuck with George’s prose for half the book, opposed to Francesco’s more formally poetic half (again, I cannot emphasize enough how the selling point for this book was Italian ghost), I considered switching, making my own decision2 about which half to read first, which would be anybody’s prerogative.
I now have an intuitive sense of the “order” of plot points, but I also know it is shaped by how I will always be a reader who read George’s story first and Francesco’s second. As I was reading Francesco’s half, I was looking for the hooks to hang George’s story on. I imagine I would have done the same if my copy has come to me in the reverse order. And my retelling of it above would have been different if I read the story “eyes, camera.”
I’m being cagey about the details of plot of the book, in so much as there is one, because any new event happens in a linear sequence in the book, it feels like a revelation, given that so much of Smith’s prose is occupied with the simultaneous. One of the “boths” of the title is past and present, which George experiences through memory and life and Francesco through memory and haunting. The difference experiences of time between the protagonists seems to be the reason for the gap in form. George experiences life, inundated and interrupted by memories, that Smith is able to layer on top of each other in her prose through dialogue that looks standard, but is often memories and current moments occurring simultaneoulsy,3 whereas Francesco’s more poetic sections are struggling moments of parsing the lines between life and death, as well as memory and new information, as a viewer of the present. Each protagonist has moments of parallel memory and experience of the linear timeline of the story, and that linear assumption is undercut repeatedly by qualifiers in the narrative. “George’s mother says…Not says. Said. George’s mother is dead.” and “But none of the above has happened. Not yet anyway.” are two of these qualifiers from George’s half of the story.
Despite my preference for an Ferrarese phantasm over a English adolescent, I quickly fell into George’s story (after all, George does actually go to Italy on a trip too) and knew immediately that I wanted to write about it for non-romance romance. Points of view and how they work in romance and books that I feel are romantic are some of my favorite considerations. I feel like a hallmark of a thoughtful romance novel is when I can tell an author considers who is telling what bit of information to the reader. Some of my favorite romance novels, that sincerely feel like magic tricks to me, are dual timeline, dual POV, where an author has to manage at least five knowledge bases: what each characters knows/feels in each timeline, as well what the reader knows in the timeline of them reading the book.
Either if Smith’s experiment fails for some readers (many readers on Goodreads express just this!) I love the idea of a book on a scale that it surrounds a reader. I felt this acutely when I read War and Peace earlier this year, as one of my annual winter big reads. I usually start a Big Book sometime in November and for the past few years, I read it, and only it, until I finish it in January/February. Like I said in the War and Peace non-romance romance: “A truly big book definitionally resists being a “moment,” even in the scale of an entire life. Most novels I read, I finish in a day or two. War and Peace took me a three and half months—that’s two orders of magnitude longer—in part because I had to live my life in the middle of all the reading. I don’t think a big book is inherently better or more important, but by its nature, my life cannot be just a frame to the experience of reading it, but instead must be seamed with the experience of the book.”
How to be Both doesn’t expand temporality like that; it could be read in a weekend. I dragged my feet and took a week off in between the two sections because I didn’t want to be finished and I was so overwhelmed by the poetry of Francesco’s section that I ended up reading the whole thing out loud to myself, something I’ve never been compelled to do before. So the scale I mean does not work the same way as War and Peace’s, but rather the way that the whole of How to be Both cannot be accessed by me. I can reread the book in the alternate order the next time I pick it up, which is probably what I will do, and imagine what it would be like for information about the links between these two characters to come to me first through Francesco and then through George.
To explain how this relates to romance, particularly dual point of view romances, I need you to look at a piece of art, an exercise that I think Smith would appreciate.
House III by Roy Lichtenstein is an outdoor sculpture as my home museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. Depending on the angle you are viewing the house, the sculpture appears flat, convex (like a real house) and then the actual truth, which is that it is concave.
The reader experience of How To Be Both feels like looking a dual perspective romance novel at an angle that reveals artificial structure, while also exploring a new relationship between viewer/reader and the idea of hearing two perspectives. By intensifying the gap that will occur between two people experiencing the same thing through the mirror images that Smith gives us in the prints of the novel, a reader of this dual perspective becomes one half of a whole, aligned with half the readers of the book and in opposition to half.
The experience of reading the book the mirrors that essential question of romance! How does someone communicate with another person about their feelings and in turn receive communication about their feelings? Even when the events are shared experiences, language gets messy at meeting in the middle. This is what we normally bear witness as romance readers, in that high and mighty position of Reader, with access to both perspectives. How To Be Both lays the reader low and externalizes the mismatch and refuses to give an easy resolution. I’ll never be on the side of the universe where I read the book in the other order. It will always be a simulacrum or an imagining or a exercise in sympathy with reviewers who got that order or chose it for themselves.
recommendations
Suki Waterhouse’s music: What is Suki Waterhouse most famous for? I’m not totally sure—maybe reading Lolita in a park with Bradley Maestro Cooper, or being engaged to Robert Pattinson? Maybe being the third female lead in the Daisy Jones and the Six adaptation? Neither here now there: I love her music. In How to Be Both, there’s a mention of a photograph of Sylvie Vartan and Françoise Hardy, which is also used as the cover image for the first edition cover. Both Vartan and Hardy were French model/actresses who were also yé-yé singers.
Yé-yé is a French style of music that is swinging and carefree and I primarily associate with French class in high school and Megan Draper singing “Zou Bisou Bisou” at Don’s colleagues on Mad Men. Many of the yé-yé girls were models and actresses, and prime fodder for ripping a picture out of a magazine and sticking on a wall (sticking things on a wall is a big theme of my life and How to Be Both.) Suki Waterhouse, with her sing-talking, cheeky references to her relationships with other celebrities, and just a general sleepiness is the closest thing we have to a current yé-yé girl. She also has incredible bangs.
Saving Grace by Julie Garwood: I read this as research for an upcoming Reformed Rakes episode and was surprised by how much I loved it. I enjoy Garwood’s writing, but usually find her books drag in the last third and I almost always let me check outs lapse before I finish them. But I devoured this book! It is a classic Garwood set up with an English bride and a Scottish laird, but the English bride is a widow, who when she learns of her first husband’s death, falls on her knees and thanks God for the news.
Movern Callar dir. Lynne Ramsey: I am currently trying to figure out how to write about this movie as a romance. It is a dark comedy about a woman’s whose boyfriend dies by suicide and what she does in the fall out. Her choices do not include telling anyone about his death! Movern Callar quickly jumped to the top of my “characters in 21st century film” rankings and I’m really excited to read the experimental novel it is based on.
Smith retains the quirks in spellings and grammar from the original letter.
The e-book provides the reader with exactly this choice, providing both options. So the text goes Eyes, Camera, Camera, Eyes.
One complaint I saw on Goodreads was the lack of quotation marks to signal speech. My response is the same as that complaint about Sally Rooney (no quotation marks, literary fiction) and Anne Mallory (underused dialogue tag, romance): I don’t think it is a sin of a book to demand you pay close attention to who is speaking. And in the case of Smith, the lack of quotation marks and lack of clarity in the distinction between memory/speech, speaker/listener is very much The Point.