The flap copy says that “Artful is a book about the things art can do, the things art is full of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness,” and that’s a solid description of this smart and satisfying book, which is actually a series of lectures that Smith gave at Oxford in January and February 2012. The lectures (“On time,” “On form,” “On edge,” and “On offer and reflection”) are not straight lectures, though: there’s a fictional frame of a narrator haunted by his/her deceased partner (I don’t think gender pronouns are ever used; it doesn’t really matter, does it?) and then lectures within that frame. This is a very bookish book: the narrator’s partner was an academic; a lot of the frame involves the narrator re-reading and reflecting on Oliver Twist; there are snippets of poetry and other quotations throughout both the frame and the lectures within the frame; there is lots of wordplay. There are some great images: I love this so much, after the narrator moves a chair and rumples some rugs in the process:
Yes, the light was much better here. The rugs, all skewy now, looked like creatures, a mess of dogs asleep in random places on the floor. I quite liked that. I liked the thought that the room was full of new and unexpected sleeping dogs. (7)
“On time” might be my favorite section of the book, for the way it talks about time and reading and writing, the way the narrator reads the start of Oliver Twist and reacts to it and captures those reactions, the way this section talks about the appeal of the fragment (“the act of making it up from what we’ve got and what we haven’t” (26)), and about linearity and reading and writing, how the novel “is always about now, both the now in which it is being written and the now in which it is being read” (37). But there are lovely bits throughout: “On form” has a section in which the narrator goes to Brighton in October, and it’s vivid and funny and poignant: rain, and a book about birds and the forms their nests take, and an arcade with a Super Steer-a-Ball and the form/meaning language gives to things. “On edge” and “On offer” both have really satisfying passages defining the terms of the lectures’ titles, which I kind of want to quote in full except they’re kind of long. (I think I might have waited too long between finishing this and writing about it: it’s been seventeen days, including a weekend at the Jersey Shore and a long weekend in Salem, NY, and all the things I liked about this book are less fresh in my mind now than they were. Which maybe just means I should re-read this, someday.)
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