How to be both

On two complementary contemporary (contemplomentorary?) authors

Around six years ago, I decided to get serious about reading. Lord knows my book-buying habits have been consistently prodigious, but I was beginning to feel like I was running in my own comfy, idiosyncratic channels without opening myself up to a wider range of opportunity. In particular, I felt very out of touch with contemporary literature - the fascinating books that people were reading and writing now. I started to seek out articles in all the Reviews of Books - New York! London! - to get some hints. And that’s how, during the course of a single week, I became acquainted with the work of Rachel Cusk and Ali Smith. 

I was intrigued, at first, because of the superficial similarities between these authors. They were both middle-aged women from the UK (Cusk, b. 1967, Canada-born British; Smith, b. 1962, Scottish) who had just finished or embarked upon career-defining series of high-literary novels: Cusk’s Outline Trilogy (2014-2018) and Smith’s Seasonal Quartet (2016-2020). 

I immediately ordered the first volume of each series from the library. Despite the authors’ shallow likenesses, their books were as different as could be - and I found myself obsessed with both. 

Cusk’s arguably more celebrated series follows a successful British writer named Faye - a clear stand-in for the novelist - who spends three books attending literary conferences, renovating her apartment, managing her children, and engaging with colleagues. We learn very little about Faye herself, though, because everyone she meets treats her as a repository for monologues. From maudlin to condescending to reprehensible to defensive, an array of interlocutors - generally though not exclusively privileged and educated like herself - meet Faye’s passivity with an indomitable sense of their own grievance and self-importance. Faye comments very little on these stories, and yet her judgment and superiority seep through every sentence. 

Smith’s Seasonal Quartet is an altogether different affair. Worlds away from Faye’s icy reserve, Smith’s characters inhabit a sprawling, heightened version of Right Now. The first installment, Autumn, released less than four months after the Brexit referendum, is a real-time reckoning with that shocking event as it affected a very young woman and a very old man, both of whose inner lives gleefully explode across the page. The other books feature different but related casts of characters navigating the affairs of the day, with the final one, Summer (2020), covering the earliest days of the pandemic; I finished reading it on Election Night. And yet, despite the seriousness of the times Smith is commenting on, the books are boisterous comedies, stuffed to bursting with unabashed artistic passions (each novel finds time to celebrate one or more lesser-known but deserving artists of the past) and linguistic playfulness amidst the inconvenient intrusion of headline events. 

I encourage anyone reading this to leap out and get their hands on both of these series immediately. But the impetus for this post is the fact that I’ve just read two wildly different stand-alone, utterly sui generis works from both authors, one-of-a-kind books that illuminate their differences in a way that further justifies my initial linkage of their disparate work. Reading both in close proximity was like navigating an overworld and its corresponding underworld - working together, they created something larger. 

Ali Smith wrote Artful in 2012 as a series of lectures on European comparative literature delivered at Oxford; it was just republished in the U.S. this spring. Though categorized as non-fiction, the lectures actually come together in the form of a novel. An unnamed narrator, mourning their deceased partner - a professor of literature - begins to leaf through the notes for an unfinished series of lectures that were left behind when they died. These discovered writings reveal a playful, questioning ramble through the value of expression, the manipulations of storytelling, and the ability of art to guide us through the high and low times of our lives. The story folds in on itself metafictionally while also thrusting out into the wider world with rhapsodic abandon, guiding the reader’s attention via quotes, authors, stories, and literary motifs to a galaxy of references to embrace and explore. 

A month after reading Artful I picked up Cusk’s latest, Parade. Mostly gone is the confident, cool, borderline snarkiness of the Outline Trilogy - this book, for all its brevity, rumbles with biblical austerity. In a flip on Smith’s creation, it’s categorized as a novel but contains brittle layers of real-life art history and autofiction that keep it tethered to our reality. Most of the “characters” are artists based on real-life figures (Louise Bourgeois, Eric Rohmer, etc.), but who are all, in a flourish of intentional obfuscation, named “G.” A Faye-like narrator bleeds between first- and second-person plural, interspersing Cusk’s own autobiographical stories (such as being the victim of a random, violent attack in Paris) with those of the artists. The themes throughout mirror those of Artful - what is art for, how does it work, who gets to make it? - but in a decidedly minor key. 

Both books read like grand statements, story-manifestoes that point the way to vastly different conclusions about the production and consumption of art. Smith’s vision is ultimately optimistic - while refusing to soft-pedal the rotten aspects of existence (contemporary or otherwise), Artful offers solace and comfort from culture and community. Which doesn’t mean ignoring the state of the world - to the contrary, in this and other works, Smith dives headlong, clumsily and bravely, into politics, without ever losing her universal empathy. Even the characters in her novels with monstrous beliefs are allowed the grace of humanity, squandered though it might be. 

In contrast, Cusk feels like a fatalist - the wry humor of the Outline Trilogy makes way for Parade’s grim wade through the self-delusion and denial that are the inevitable handmaidens of survival in the 21st century. And yet, Cusk seems to place herself somehow above politics, in a nearly Beckettian realm where bourgeois values replace the blasted wasteland. 

A recent buzzy takedown of Cusk by Andrea Long Chu in New York magazine emphatically argues the point that Cusk’s political apathy is related to a dangerous inability to view gender outside of traditional dichotomies. Unlike Smith’s Artful, in which both the narrator and the dead partner are genderless - the prose is carefully crafted to ensure that any reader can project themselves into either role - the world of Parade is mercilessly gendered. Cusk’s speakers frequently pose the question of what it means, both socially and biologically, to be a “woman artist.” Men and women say and do things in different, often conflicting ways - and she leaves you twisting with the discomfort of whether it is her narrators and characters that believe in these brutal dualities, or the author herself. 

I don’t have the intellectual firepower or eye for detail to rebut Chu’s arguments, but I feel that her view of Parade is willfully narrow. Many of her critiques of Cusk’s views feel deserved - and she certainly has quotes from many of Cusk’s essays and memoirs to back up her position - but I think that Cusk as an artist, a storyteller, can’t help but to stretch past these boundaries. I was moved - shaken - by Parade, and not because of its ostensibly recherché gender politics. 

At one point in her critique, Chu points out that, “As Cusk herself has suggested, the novel is a kind of objet trouvé, mute as a slab of marble; it takes a witness to make its cold neutrality catch fire.” While Parade certainly features a strong motif of “what it means to be a female artist,” this particular cishet white dilettante experienced something more universal in Cusk’s stark parables of human creation. The book butts up against big, existential questions about the meaning - or lack thereof - in all of our lives. In the place of traditional narrative, it draws together scraps of stories and images that outline our struggle and failure to turn our lives into stories that can satisfy and console. I put it down feeling lonely and afraid. As someone who’s more than a dabbler in self-delusion and denial myself, I consider that an accomplishment. 

That said, I don’t think it’ll surprise people to hear that my heart belongs with Smith. I deeply admire Cusk and her terrifying accomplishments, but her world isn’t where I wish to live. Like a forbidding Arctic landscape, it’s a beautiful place that I feel privileged to visit, with a certainty that, while I might not always agree, provides a certain cold comfort. Smith’s books, by contrast, are a reprieve - the cluttered home of a dotty, queer aunt who respects you enough to tell things as they are but firmly believes in the fleeting but essential consolations of the senses. 

Last year, I read Smith’s novel How to Be Both (2014), a cleverly bifurcated book with two distinct halves - one about a modern British teenage girl, one about a 15th-century Italian Renaissance painter. The stories intertwine and bleed into each other, of course, but here’s the twist - the book was published with two print runs, each of which placed the halves in a different order. You don’t know what you’re gonna get until you start reading, and your experience will forever be different from that of people who read it the other way around. It’s up to you - your imagination, your empathy, your own experience - to find the common ground in the story and then turn that exercise back onto your own life. 

For me, the reading of Cusk and Smith provides a similar challenge and thrill. I wouldn’t feel as awestruck by Cusk’s forbidding intelligence if I hadn’t emerged from Smith’s warm, baggy library, and the pleasure of that library is enhanced by re-entering it from the cold. Every day, I ping-pong between both poles - the hope and hopelessness, the provocation and the commiseration, the ice and the fire, the rigidly defined and the frighteningly free. 

Between the two, I seek a third way of reading - and being: both.