Artful by Ali Smith #ABookADayInMay No.27

I haven’t read any Ali Smith before, and I got sent Artful as a review copy when it was published in 2012 – and I decided on a whim this morning that it would be today’s book. And what a strange book it is.

It is based on four lectures that Ali Smith apparently gave at Oxford University (and since I was still a post-graduate student at Oxford in 2012, presumably I could have found my way to attending them) – On Time, On Form, On Edge, and One Offer and On Reflection. But this is not a collection of those essays. Or, rather, it is not just a collection of those essays. It hovers somewhere between fiction and non-fiction – and opens with a woman who is mourning their partner. It has been a year and a day since they left (originally I thought they’d just gone – but it becomes clear that they have died). (By the way, I’m writing ‘they’ because I’m not sure if we know if it’s a man or a woman – though I may have just inadvertently glided past pronouns.)

The narrator goes into the study. “I looked at your books, I took one of your books off a shelf at random – my study, my desk, my books now.” And the book is Oliver Twist. The title Artful suddenly takes on a new dimension when we realise it can refer to the Artful Dodger. And the narrator decides to re-read the book for the first time since university.

And then… the partner has come back. Or have they?

You were standing in the doorway. You coughed. The cough was you in a way that couldn’t not be you.

You were covered in dust and what looked like bits of rubble. Your clothes were smudged, matted, torn. You were wearing that black waistcoat with the white stitching that went out of fashion in 1995, the one we gave to Oxfam. Your skin was smudged. Your hair was streaked with dust and grit. You looked bruised. You shook yourself slightly there on the landing and little bits of grit and rubble fell off you, I watched some of it fall down the stairs behind you.

I’m late, you said.

And somehow all of this morphs into the essays. In the world of the book, the content of the essays has been written by the dead partner – and the narrator is reading them, occasionally (but not as often as you might think) responding to and commenting on them.

The essays themselves are much more what you’d expect. Well, at least what you’d expect if you’ve been to a lot of literature lectures – they are the sort of reflections on literature that tread the line between general and specific, and take in a wide world of books from across languages and centuries. There’s far too much content to even give an idea of it, really, and I did enjoy Smith’s way of moving from idea to idea, encompassing so much. At times it does become little more than a series of quotations with a word or two of commentary, often linking to the previous and next quotations only tangentially. There were certainly times where I wish she’d lingered more on one thought, fully exploring it before going onto another.

I think ‘On Time’ was my favourite of the four sections, perhaps simply because it was the first. And here’s a section of it:

The difference between the short story form and the novel form is to do, not with length, but with time. The short story will always be about brevity, ‘“The shortness of life! The shortness of life!”’ (as one of Mansfield’s characters in her story At the Bay can’t help but exclaim). Because of this, the short story can do anything it likes with notions of time; it moves and works spatially regardless of whether it adheres to chronology or conventional plot. It is an elastic form; it can be as imagistic and achronological as it likes and it will still hold its form. In this it emphasizes the momentousness of the moment. At the same time it deals in, and doesn’t compromise on, the purely momentary nature of everything, both timeless and transient.

The story can be partial, can be a piece of something and still hold its own, still be whole. The novel, on the other hand, is bound to and helplessly interested in society and social hierarchy, social worlds; and society is always attached to, in debt to, made by and revealed by the trappings of its time.

Maybe a book with as many ideas in it as Artful shouldn’t really be read in a day, and I should have spent more time with each thought, rather than moving onto the next. There’s also the undeniable fact that I have read huge amounts of literary theory and literary criticism in my time, and most of it is not very engaging. Smith’s is certainly a cut above the majority, but perhaps I have reached my lifetime quotient of what I find interesting in this genre? Well, I did find a lot of Artful interesting, but often with a sort of jaded “Yes, I see; I’ve read this sort of idea before. I’ve heard an undergraduate talk about it earnestly at a seminar. I’ve witnessed the novel form be dissected in clever ways over and over.” (I do recognise that I am writing this on a book blog, but there is a big difference between a reader’s book reviews and a work of literary criticism, and often I think the main difference is the point behind them.)

If I came to the ideas in Artful here for the first time, then I suspect I’d have been blown away. As it was, I did appreciate a lot but with a certain weariness. And I preferred the more fictional sections – the two characters she creates are very much enigmatic, but also intriguing and compelling. I enjoyed finding out more about them, even in the shadowy way they are revealed.

Did the merge of fiction and non-fiction work? I think so, more or less. It’s unusual and perhaps unnecessary, but does make Artful a more interesting and characterful book than it would otherwise be. Or perhaps just more artful?