But this is only one of the ways the novel, whose stylistic antecedents are more modernist than postmodernist, experiments with form. The order of these two sections is arbitrary – it is reversed in different printings of the novel. It is a diptych, its two sections describing, respectively, the experiences of a young woman in Renaissance Italy who disguises herself as a man to become an artist’s apprentice (Francesca-Francesco) and a teenage girl with a boyish name in modern Britain (Georgia, known as George). How to be both does not really have a plot in any conventional sense, though it is full of incident and connection and consequence, and it is certainly coherent and purposeful in its structure. And it is this ontological status that interests Ali Smith, whose most recent novel How to be both (2014) is, I think, one of the most slippery, intriguing and stimulating works of fiction to have appeared in recent years. Art is an intervention in reality, a presence. Viewed with care and attention, an art work will signal its status as an object or text or event it will provide generic markers or explicit clues that will signal how it would like to be experienced and interpreted, even if an element of ambiguity remains. Yet there is a sense in which all art is necessarily self-referential. And it is true that when artists start making art about art, there is always a danger that the self-referentiality will result in a kind of inbent vortex of self-indulgence. He had in mind a certain kind of postmodern fiction, in which an explict and compulsive interrogation of form is pushed to its logical conclusion, hollowing out the possibility of meaning and expression. Joanna Braithwaite, Busted 2015, oil on canvas, 112 x 112 cm, Courtesy Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, Photo: Jenni Carterĭavid Foster Wallace once observed that art’s reflection on itself is terminal.

Ali smith how to be both review