How to Be Both by Ali Smith

How hard is How to Be Both to read?

How to Be Both scores 76 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 72 out of 100

The Francesco sections deploy dense Renaissance art-craft vocabulary — sinopia, azzurrite, bianco sangiovanni, cinabrese, verde-terra, minium, lapis, porphyry, breccia, paonazzo, arabescato — alongside embedded Italian phrases and archaic constructions reflecting a 15th-century Ferrarese consciousness. The contemporary George sections use standard modern English, but the novel as a whole asks readers to navigate two registers with little assistance. Sits near 2666 on craft vocabulary without reaching Gravity's Rainbow's scientific extremes.

Sentence structure: 78 out of 100

The Francesco narrator sections cascade in long, lightly punctuated runs — sentences stretching hundreds of words through parenthetical asides, embedded memory spirals, and associative leaps that follow the painter's disoriented ghost-consciousness. Colons and brackets multiply inside already-complex clauses. The effect sits near Absalom, Absalom! in its refusal of conventional sentence resolution, though Smith's sentences remain warmer and more navigable than Faulkner's. The George sections are syntactically easier but share a compressed, elliptical quality.

Abstraction: 65 out of 100

The novel thinks hard about time, vision, gender, grief, and the nature of art — but always anchored in sensory material: brickwork, egg tempera, the smell of horse piss, a teenager's bedroom wall. Francesco meditates on what pictures do to the people in them and whether forgetting and remembering are the same water. These are philosophical claims, but Smith makes them through action and image rather than argument. Closer to The Great Gatsby's social observation-through-story than to Waiting for Godot's existential abstraction.

Information density: 72 out of 100

Each page carries simultaneous loads: 15th-century Ferrarese history, d'Este court politics, Renaissance art theory (Alberti, Cennini), the material science of fresco-making, a contemporary grief narrative, and Smith's own formal argument about dual-orderedness. Francesco's digressions on pigment-grinding and the pleasure house are also character revelation, backstory, and art theory at once. The density is closer to 2666's historical layering than to the single-thread pull of plot-driven fiction.

Narrative indirection: 78 out of 100

Neither plot strand is explained to the reader. Francesco's situation — a 15th-century woman painter reborn as a ghost, observing a modern grieving teenager — must be inferred from context. The girl's identity, her mother's death, and the nature of her obsession with a woman across the street accumulate through oblique detail rather than exposition. Francesco mistakes a phone for a votive tablet and pornography for devotional imagery; the novel never corrects these misreadings, leaving readers to triangulate meaning from the gap. More direct than Pedro Paramo but requires constant active reconstruction.

Symbolic density: 78 out of 100

The novel is built from interlocking symbols: the ring in the puddle (art and love rippling invisibly through all matter), Francesco's mother's dress (grief, identity, cross-dressing, inheritance), the fresco's JUSTICE with letters burned away to leave ICE, the seed that must fall to rise. Francesco's dual gender is simultaneously literal biographical fact and the novel's central emblem — how to contain contradictions without resolving them. Smith plants correspondences between the two half-narratives (walls, backs of people, the act of watching) that reward re-reading. Closer to To the Lighthouse than to Moby-Dick.

Ironic distance: 68 out of 100

Francesco's confusion — interpreting purgatory as a painters' afterlife, smartphones as devotional tablets, Cambridge as an alien city of icon-worshippers — generates genuine comedy while making serious claims about perception and time. The novel is earnest about its themes even as it dramatizes them through a figure who is constitutionally confused. Smith trusts this ironic frame to carry the weight without undercutting it. Less systematically ironic than The Sellout or Pale Fire; more like Ishmael's humor amid Moby-Dick's tragedy.

Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100

The novel refuses to resolve whether Francesco is real, hallucinatory, or metaphorical. George's grief arc ends without definitive healing. The two editions (George first / Francesco first) produce different readings with no authoritative order, structurally enacting the novel's argument that both/and exceeds either/or. The fresco's ultimate fate, Francesco's death, and the nature of the girls' connection are all left deliberately open. Sits above Lolita's open meaning and approaching the ambiguity of Crying of Lot 49.

Structural complexity: 85 out of 100

The defining formal move — two half-novels published in opposite orders depending on edition, so the reader's experience of the book changes based on which half they read first — is among the most radical structural experiments in contemporary British fiction. Within the Francesco sections, time moves non-linearly through memory, apprenticeship, love, and the fresco commission in associative rather than chronological sequence. The ghost's disorientation as it navigates a modern city it cannot name mirrors the reader's disorientation navigating a text without stable orientation. Comparable to Flights in its discontinuous form, though more narratively sustained.

How How to Be Both is regarded

How to Be Both holds a literary regard score of 61 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.