Art, whether it is a debased film or a hung fresco, or this magnificent book, reminds us of this lesson, so we can go back into the world to live. The desire to capture the past, Smith beautifully shows, is one of our essential ways of recognizing that it lives like the ghost of a painter or the memories of a dead mother. In her mind, George can and does enter Francesco’s painting, just as part - perhaps not quite such a sentient part - of Francesco lives on in his (or her) work. Soon George begins skipping school to take the underground into London’s National Gallery to gaze deeply into one of Francesco’s paintings. She stumbles upon a film of an older man with an underage girl and is so shocked - each time she views it, the abuse happens again - George decides to watch it every day as an act of bearing witness to what is lost in that moment. Meanwhile, after the death of her mother, George begins to watch pornography on her iPad. And thus by pretending to be a man - for an hour at a time - she becomes one for the rest of time. Instead she draws her, and so it is in this abject, private space that she learns to love with her eyes and masters her craft. One night, Francesco - who has bound her breasts - goes to a brothel and refuses to sleep with a prostitute. They also pivot neatly around notions of watching and the watched. They are love stories, and they are tales of grief.
Both begin with a member of the dead, speaking into the present. If your brain hasn’t melted yet, there’s also this: George’s and Francesco’s tales mirror each other like two ice skaters slicing a perfect routine. When George considers writing a fictional biography of Francesco for a class project, the reader must confront the fact that perhaps it is George’s tale of Francesco that we read (or have just read).Įven spookier, the tale about Francesco begins with the dead painter looking out from a fresco, observing George studying one of the frescoes, and mistaking her for a boy. George, a modern girl with a boy’s name, is as imagined by Francesco as the other way around. It would be easy to make too much of this ruse because however you read it “How to Be Both” shows this random sequencing to be a false binary.
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