Two Novels, Three Dead Moms
Art and Death in Martyr! and How to be both
Hello readers,
Have you ever noticed how many stories start with “mom is dead”? The trope is so prevalent my daughter noticed it by age four. Ever since, the “dead mom book” has become something of a recognized subgenre in our household.
The dead mom story is not limited to Disney, YA novels or movies in which the (cuter! younger!) future step-mother wins a widower’s heart just in time for the holidays.
My very literary Reading about Artists list includes two novels with at least three dead moms between them. But with a twist: these are Art Mothers.
I know some of you reading this miss your mom right now. I’ve wondered whether the odds any given story has a 44% chance of featuring a character whose mother is dead feels comforting to readers whose own mothers are with us only in spirit.
You are not alone. And at the same time, you are living a singular experience, an arc worthy of a main character.
Or is it a drag, to encounter this particular figurative stand-in for both emptiness and for freedom from expectations? This particular device, which makes questions like “Where was the protagonist’s mother when she did that highly risky, plot propulsive thing?” conveniently irrelevant.
When you miss the person who gave you life, how does it feel to stumble again and again on stories where a dead mother might simply be an expedient ploy to bring the main character face-to-face with mortality, so he can decide how he wants to live?
Both ways I imagine, depending on the day. Please take care here.
How to be both
Ali Smith’s novel How to be both contains two intertwined stories, one from the perspective of a Renaissance fresco artist and the other about George, a modern British teenager in mourning.
The stories can be read in either order. In fact, two versions of the novel were published at the same time. Your copy and a friend’s may each start with a different narrative.
Mine starts with the Old World consciousness of the painter, inexplicably yanked up from the grave into modern London. Coming-to in the National Gallery, where a painting it created is housed, this consciousness links up with the energy of a mysterious youth who views the painting. Here it tries in vain to be heard across the planes of space, time, and mortality.
Instead, we get a story. The consciousness identifies as a brickmaker's child in15th century Ferrara, who swaps dressing up in dead mom’s clothes for breeches and the self-chosen moniker Francescho, opening opportunities to train as an artist. An absolute commitment to making art that captures the experiences and feelings of real people shines through the artist’s various sexcapades, intimate friendships, and attempts to eek a living from painting.
Commissioned to paint frescoes in the palace of an invective Duke, Francescho writes a letter demanding pay worthy of the work’s quality. Rebuked, the artist subversively alters the frescos then hightails it out of town.
The consciousness recalls all of this–plus dying from the plague–while also observing and reporting strange and obsessive behaviors of the youth from the gallery. To be honest, this death-defying first half of the book only made half-sense to me.
It felt like looking at art of another time or culture, without any context. Certain language and images resonated emotionally, but I felt frustrated that I could not explain it or recognize all its references. If I’d known it was possible when I started the book, I think I’d have read the narratives in the opposite order.
The second half, told in a third-person point of view, aligns closely to the teenager’s perspective and fills in many gaps. I found my understanding of the first half changing and shifting as I read the second.
No spoilers– George’s mother is also dead. Banter lifted from scenes in their recent life together are interwoven with George’s attempts to carry on, absent any help from her alcoholic father.
She visits with (and outwits) a counselor, remembers the time her mother took her and her brother out of school for a spontaneous trip to see Francesco del Cossa’s frescoes at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Italy, and repeatedly skips school to spend time with a portrait by the same painter at the National Gallery.
She tails someone her mother knew in life– was this woman surveilling her mother, a progressive labor economist by day and subversive online pop-up artist by night, as an agent of the state? Or were they in love? Both?--experiences a first crush with another girl, and begins to make some art of her own.
While she was alive, George heckled her mother by questioning the point of art, insisting that history is over and done. Now that mum’s gone, George gives second consideration to the questions she received in reply:
What comes first, what we see or how we see?
Do things just go away?
Do things that happened not exist, or stop existing, just because we can’t see them in front of us? What about the things happening in front of us we fail to see?
The structure and playful humor of this novel enliven the reader beyond the most obvious answers to these questions.
For what it’s worth, I ultimately interpreted the mystery of the Francescho section of the book to be George’s own creation, a way she keeps her mother close through imagining the mind of her favorite artist.
But would I understand it this way, if I’d read the two stories in reverse order? If I didn’t know the book had been structured so it could be read both ways? If the examples of looking within the novel hadn’t reminded me of layers of meaning beneath every surface, like frescoes in the Palazzo? If you read it, I’d love to know what you made of it.
Smith’s experiment in How to be both cleverly highlights that we process life events in the order they are received. But through imagination, creativity, and especially through art– we get another chance to make it mean something. To be both is to be here and gone, ourselves and another, and to experience a kind of beauty that “is never found in a single body, but is something shared instead between more than one body” through art and love.
Ali Smith’s next book Gliff, comes out October 31 in the UK and February 4 in the U.S. It’s a genre-bender that explores how and why we endeavor to make a mark on the world through the story of a mysterious red line, two children who discover it, and a horse. Glyph, an interconnected book that will tell a story hidden in Gliff so that the books can be read independently or together, is set to follow in August.
High concept. Are we up for this?
Martyr!
Cyrus Sham’s mother has been dead most of his life. He’s always known she was shot out of the sky by the U.S. Navy while traveling on passenger flight 665 from Iran to Dubai in 1988, when he was just an infant.
This doesn’t stop his father from immigrating to the U.S. to raise his son in a less constrained environment. Ali works at an industrial chicken farm, dying himself shortly after Cyrus enters college.
When we meet Cyrus, he’s not too attached to living. He’s a poet who drinks about writing. Mostly numb to those around him, he pours his creative energy into an informal narcotics trade economy designed on a scale of one. One day he quits and begins to rebuild his entire personality and daily schedule.
This clears his head to think more intentionally about death, specifically whether his might make a mark, in contrast to his parents’ deaths–which like most deaths, and thus most lives, passed unremarked by the collective.
He begins working on a book of poems and prose, “elegies for people I’ve never met” called BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx, excerpted at the beginning of chapters throughout the novel. Many of those chapters are dream sequences in which characters from his life interact with celebrities like Lisa Simpson, Kareem Abdul-Jabar, a certain unnamed but highly recognizable U.S. presidential candidate.
Some of my favorites feature his roommate/lover Zee and uncle Arash who had an unusual job of performing the role of an angel to reinforce martyrdom among the Iranian army's near-death casualties.
As I read Martyr!, I was surprised by some of the ways it recalled How to be both for me. These dream-like sequences had a similar effect to the Francescho narrative, bringing humor but also an emotional texture to the more straightforward narrative.
Then there’s the dead mother and the coincidental encounter with a figure in a gallery that leads to a discovery of an aspect of the mother’s life that had been hidden.
Both novels explore what art’s for. In Martyr! there are many answers. The point of art is for it to be interesting, a way to spend time that counteracts the need to make money, the only way “to make something that would not have existed in the entirety of humanity if I had not been there to make it.”
I read a contrasting shadow of the beauty-that-requires-two-bodies theory Francescho shares, in the words of Iranian performance artist Orkideh whose interaction with Cyrus holds the heart of the story. She thinks: “Art is a way of storing our brains in each other’s,” ugliness and all.
Ultimately, both books are about how art can make staying on the earth, as it somehow carries on in indifference to the death of a loved one, bearable for those left behind. Each novel poignantly encourages paying closer attention to what and who surrounds you.
Like Francescho’s narrative, Cyrus’s story leaves some things open to interpretation. At the conclusion, is he in love, or has he died? Or both? If you read this, please share what you thought of the ending.
I really enjoyed this book. In the acknowledgements, Akbar thanks the readers for the gift of their attention, and it’s clear to me that making a book worthy of taking up our brains and time was paramount to his creative process. I look forward to whatever he’ll do next.
In case you missed it
Inspired by the Book Riot podcast, I tried to guess which books would be on the National Book Awards for fiction and non-fiction. I’ve updated my posts about this with my (abysmal) results. Thanks to Natalie McGlocklin of Subverse Reads for posting her own guesses and to Jeff ONeal and Rebecca Schinsky for only gently ribbing me on their podcast for setting my scoring system to Easy Mode—they never punch down, another reason to listen to their podcast.
Recently, I posted a new installment of the BookStack directory, a little service I’ve been performing for the community of people writing primarily about books and authors other than themselves on Substack. Check it out if you’re looking for more.
I’d like to extend a special welcome to all the new subscribers, many of whom found me via my friend Petya K. Grady’s well-deserved feature in Substack Reads this past weekend. If you’d like to know more about what to expect from this newsletter, my full intro is available here.
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All 2024 proceeds from this Substack go to organizations or individual librarians fighting legal challenges against book bans. Shout out to two new paid subscribers and a couple of my most favorite people in IRL, Stacy and Stephanie. I’m looking for at least one more to join us and tip the scales toward making another donation next week (Banned Books Week here in the U.S.).
Cheers,
Abra
That scoring system - the one where we received a score of zero - is considered the easy one??? Rude. But I had so much fun playing 😆
Great review of martyr. It’s a good book that went a little off the rails but really brought it all home at the end. I like it the more I think about it