Book review: Artful

AT THIS summer’s International Writers’ Conference in Edinburgh, Ali Smith spoke on style and content: whether there is, or should be, a distinction between what a writer says and how he or she says it.

The discussion that followed considered whether writers who experiment with language and form limit access to their work to an elite. Smith’s love of formal trickery is well-known, but the question is pertinent. We occupy a culture that promotes the message that life is increasingly, oppressively busy, and permits no space for the difficult. Films in foreign languages, books with subtitles, a full understanding of the voting system? You don’t have time. You’re busy. Hence the discourse of the “beach read”, the “guilty pleasure” and the “popcorn blockbuster” – not to mention the encroachment of gossip about American heiresses into newspaper pages that once held journalism.

Smith is one of those happy anomalies to whom “hard” ­literature is fun, and might actually aid in the management of hectic modern life. Her thrust with this book – a brief but expansive mash-up of literary theory, fiction and autobiography – is as much the democratisation of insight and observation as it is the display of her considerable erudition.

Smith’s prose is nothing if not artful – she favours puns, allusions, witticisms, an approach to language that spits off self-awareness. This can be an oppressive sort of style, as is known to anyone who was near enough to academia in the 1980s and 1990s to experience the soul-sapping craze for everything being (re)imagined, (mis)interpreted or in/formed – but Smith clearly knows this, and having credited her observations to fictional characters, can self-critique as she goes along. Reading a departed lover’s notes for a never-­performed lecture, the protagonist notes the clever-clever headings – “Putting The For In Form”, “Putting The Form In Transformation” and feels a pang: “They were kind of awful and it was as if they knew this about themselves and were vulnerable to it.”

But the book’s title also refers to the Artful Dodger: the protagonist is rereading Oliver Twist, and her renewed experience of that story haunts her efforts to readjust to life without her partner, and to understand that partner’s view of the world. “I liked how Fagin and the boys taught Oliver about theatre,” she notes: pickpocketing is as much an art and the demonstration of its tricks as much a performance as anything enshrined in society’s more respectable salons.

Smith shares her use of affected innocence as a route into intellectual inquiry with the pop-philosophy writings of Alain de Botton and Jostein Gaarder, the irreverent literary criticism of Geoff Dyer or the hybrid fiction-documentaries of Chris Marker and Patrick Keiller. This approach lets our fascination with story open our heads to ideas, emphasising that the writer is just another curious reader.

That can sometimes mean an excess of faux-naiveté, or an arch internal resonance too far; but Smith’s exuberance and cleverness delight more than they grate. This is a sparky, ­inspiring, charm-laded little book that makes you want to read more and differently. (A slim volume for £20, mind you – and the huge print and ­massive margins aren’t fooling anyone, Hamish Hamilton.)

Artful

Ali Smith

Hamish Hamilton, £20