Bad poems never die, never really go away: The vigor of their badness preserves them. Up they float into bad-poem limbo, where their bad lines, loose and weedlike, drift and coil and tangle with one another eternally. Robert Frost, who turned 20 in 1894, uncertain of his gift, bouncing among stray gigs (actor’s manager, repairer of lights at a wool mill) in Lawrence, Massachusetts, had written a poem called “My Butterfly.” It begins like this: “Thine emulous fond flowers are dead too, / And the daft sun-assaulter, he / That frighted thee so oft …” It is what it is, a bad poem. A random-feeling extrusion of lyrical matter, like something that might come out of the tube when you pull the lever marked POETRY.

Nevertheless, for this poem, and for the first time in his career, Frost got paid—$15, by the editor of a New York weekly called The Independent. “On reading ‘My Butterfly,’ ” Adam Plunkett writes in his new Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, “the poetry editor called the rest of the staff over to listen because she had just discovered a poet.” A woman whose literary perspicacity exceeded my own, clearly. I would have left him to molder in the slush pile.

Plunkett, whose book offers close readings of the poems as well as the life, quite likes “My Butterfly.” For him, it “reads like a spell that conjures the experience of grace.” Frost himself thought enough of the poem to include it, 19 years later, in his first collection, A Boy’s Will—where it acts as a kind of remedial concentrate, strengthening the poems around it with homeopathic doses of its own badness. “To the Thawing Wind,” for example, opens with three lines of sub-Shelleyan puff: “Come with rain, O loud Southwester! / Bring the singer, bring the nester; / Give the buried flower a dream …” (Flowers again.) But the fourth line—“Make the settled snow-bank steam”—that’s Frost. You can see the steam rising, hear it hiss across those sibilants. And the next line is better still, blunter, Frostier, more concrete even as it hums with the voltage of symbol: “Find the brown beneath the white.” The growth beneath the crust of death.

Through his poetry, with his poetry, Frost thought about symbols a lot. Were things as they merely appeared, or were they representative of something else, some higher or lower order of being? Was the world made of matter saturated in spirit, or the other way around, or neither? “God’s own descent / Into flesh was meant / As a demonstration / That the supreme merit / Lay in risking spirit / In substantiation,” he declared in 1962’s “Kitty Hawk,” writing in the philosophical doggerel of his late manner.

Many of his poems turn on the problem of having a mind—of simply being conscious, observant, in our weird human way, while existence churns through us and beyond us. Of coming upon an abandoned woodpile in the middle of winter, a thing of utter dereliction, and being unable not to invest it with some kind of personality, watching it “warm the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning of decay.”

Shortly after writing “My Butterfly,” Frost had a bit of a blowout with his girlfriend. He’d just dropped out of Dartmouth; she wasn’t ready to drop out of St. Lawrence. Did she even want to marry him? Plunkett suggests that he’d been “generally making a pain of himself in the role of jealous lover.” Badly upset, and in a state of screw-it-all young-man desperation, Frost packed his bag, left Lawrence (“without even a note to his mother,” tuts Jay Parini in his Robert Frost: A Life, from 1999), and headed for the Great Dismal Swamp—which sounds allegorical but is a real location, a forbidding stretch of wetland on the Virginia–North Carolina border.

[From the June 1951 issue: Robert Frost’s America]

Frost seems to have never been to the Great Dismal Swamp, to have had no connection to it at all. I’m speculating, but surely his only possible reason for going there was literary: the Bunyanesque name of the place (“Being the creature of literature I am,” as he would later write in “New Hampshire”). He was on his own Pilgrim’s Progress, his own symbolic quest, and he wanted to pass through his own Slough of Despond.

By train and by ship, he got himself in there—into the doom-bogs, into the fen of misery, and he did some lonely wandering. Then he came back out. He took a steamer, hooked up with a party of drunken duck hunters, hopped a freight train, got robbed by the brakeman, stayed in a hobos’ camp, made it to Baltimore, wired home for cash. It’s a great burlesque episode. Someone should write a little book, Frost in the Swamp. Plunkett rather rattles through it; Parini takes it slower, noting that a chunk of Frost’s poetic psyche was forged on this trip, down there in the great dismalia, among the mulchy ground and the dark trees: “If Frost can be said to have an archetypal poem, it is one in which the poet sets off, forlorn or despairing, into the wilderness, where he will either lose his soul or find that gnostic spark of revelation.”

“The Road Not Taken,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—these aren’t really poems anymore. Decades of mass exposure have done something to them, inverted their aura. Now they’re more like … recipes. Or in-flight safety announcements.

[From the August 1915 issue: Robert Frost’s “Birches,” “The Road Not Taken,” and “The Sound of Trees”]

Not really Frost’s fault, of course. But then again, he did love being famous. He embraced being famous. After so many years of hidden toil, scratching out a living through his 20s and 30s as a teacher and poultry farmer in Derry, New Hampshire, he adored—who wouldn’t?—his huge, unpoetic popularity when it finally arrived. And it wasn’t just the general reader, the middlebrow poetry lover—he had the respect of the bigwigs, too. Four Pulitzer Prizes (1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943), a pileup of other honors and sinecures. To John F. Kennedy he was Mr. Rabbit Frawst; the president-elect invited him to read at his inauguration, where Frost fumbled over his prepared text before reciting “The Gift Outright” from memory: “The land was ours before we were the land’s …”

The interesting comparison, fame-wise, is with Dylan Thomas, who in early-’50s America went off like a rocket while Frost was steadily expanding his audience. But Thomas was fragile and buzzing and not long for this world; Frost was solidifying. He would become an institution.

[From the February 1964 issue: John F. Kennedy’s eulogy for Robert Frost]

And yet I found it strangely easy to avoid him. To go right around him. For a long time there was a perfectly Frost-shaped hole in my understanding of American poetry. And it wasn’t a problem, because there’s something hermetic about his legacy: Frost sits alone, sealed, seeming to touch or connect with none of the poets around him. He did live, to a greater degree than most poets, in his own atmosphere, but it’s more than that. “What does it mean?” is always the wrong question in poetry. A poem is what it does, the effect it has, not what it narrowly and explicably means. And yet with Frost somehow—equivocal, enigmatic, withholding, hide-and-seek Frost, the Frost of “Mowing” and “Birches” and “Mending Wall,” rustic-inscrutable (or affecting to be), full of dark hints, so plainspoken and so tricky—this is the question you keep helplessly asking: What’s he on about here?

Take, for instance, the famous penultimate line of 1913’s “Mowing”: “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” It’s pregnant-feeling, aphoristic, winking away with compressed significance. But I don’t know what it means. Do you? Frost, the old gnome, once told an audience, “There’s one of the keys to all my life [and] thinking in one line.” Plunkett is all in; he calls this line “a creed,” adding that it “set a standard for the rest of Frost’s poetry.” But his explanations of it don’t really help me: “The creed declares that the richest aesthetic experience of imagination, the sweetest dream, is to be had by using the power of imagination to contemplate the world at hand.” Or again:

Of the creed’s manifold meaning, the double meaning most fundamental is of realist and idealist visions of knowledge, the fact as the sweetest dream that labor knows or the fact as the sweetest dream that labor knows, as if the facts of the world, like dreams, were knowable through imagination.

Perhaps I’m being obtuse. Or perhaps the necessity of any explanation at all has already short-circuited my intellect.

So I go back to the great poems, the undeniable, straightforwardly mysterious, no-explaining-required, knock-you-on-your-ass poems. The glittering miniatures (“Fire and Ice,” “Dust of Snow”), the mighty midrangers (“An Old Man’s Winter Night”), the great statements (“Desert Places”), and the shaggier, madder excursions into monologue and dialogue, his special brand of agitated farmhouse talk: “A Servant to Servants,” “The Witch of Coös.” (“Mother can make a common table rear / And kick with two legs like an army mule.”)

[From the August 1915 issue: Robert Frost, a new American poet]

Between A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston a year later, something happened: The Muses tapped him, lightning struck, poetry broke upon him in a big way. What had happened, actually, was that he had crossed the Atlantic—upped sticks, with his family, in 1912, and decamped to England for three years. A solid career move. In prewar London he met Yeats and Pound, and the extraordinary poet-critic T. E. Hulme. He hung around with lesser Georgians like Wilfrid Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie. He bonded profoundly with Edward Thomas. He had arrived, in other words, at just the moment when—and just the place where—poetry’s ancien régime was about to be dynamited by modernism.

The change was under way in his own poetry. In his creaky, earthy Robert Frost style, he was ushering in something just as shock-of-the-new as anything the modernists would produce. The drunkard on the bed in “A Hundred Collars”: “Naked above the waist, / He sat there creased and shining in the light, / Fumbling the buttons in a well-starched shirt.” It has the too-real physical exactitude of the later war poets, of Wilfred Owen or Robert Graves—but the war hadn’t happened yet. The working title for North of Boston was Farm Servants and Other People, and in its spooked, unreliable rural scenes, Frost had only one true peer at the time, the English poet Charlotte Mew. Her “The Farmer’s Bride” was published in The Nation in 1912: “When us was wed she turned afraid / Of love and me and all things human; / Like the shut of a winter’s day. / Her smile went out.”

North of Boston was Frost coming into his birthright as a poet. No more strained lyricisms, fewer flowers. “I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight”: Now that—from “After Apple-Picking”—that’s a creed, that’s a motto for a poet. The confessional throb of the line seems to place it right between Wordsworth’s “I cannot paint what then I was” and Robert Lowell’s “My mind’s not right.” Listen, indeed, to the 1951 recording of Frost reading “After Apple-Picking” and you’ll realize how close you are in this 1914 poem to Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” 44 years later, how you’re shivering on the same visionary frequency and hearing the same chanted, haunted cadence. Both poems take place in the hallucination chamber of a New England autumn. Frost’s narrator is being dragged into a death-doze by the scent of freshly picked apples, caught between his body and his dreaming mind, his instep still sore from all the hours spent up a ladder even as he goes into a trance: “Magnified apples appear and disappear”—the plumpness in that double-p sound, hypnotically renewed—“Stem end and blossom end, / And every fleck of russet showing clear.” It’s like a YouTube ad for apples, endlessly rolling, evilly glistening apples, a sumptuous close-up for which the technology did not yet exist.

Frost was a complicated fellow, not always using his powers for good. By the end of Love and Need, you’re glad to escape his company. He certainly had his trials—the death of his wife, the suicide of his son—but somehow more depressing is Plunkett’s portrait of the strange and stifling coterie around him in the latter years, the grand-old-man years, when he was playing one would-be biographer against another and maintaining a kind of zombie love triangle with his manager-secretary and her unfortunate husband, all while reaping large amounts of the especially bland worldly acclaim you get when you’re already acclaimed.

The work, all the way through, was crazily uneven. A Witness Tree (for which, naturally, he won another Pulitzer, in 1943) contains the sonnet “The Silken Tent,” which Plunkett regards as a masterpiece and I regard as a card-carrying bad poem. From the first line, “She is as in a field a silken tent,” that slithery is/as/in—we feel the ickiness of the whole creepily extended woman-as-tent conceit. But turn a few pages and you find “The Most of It,” which begins like this:

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.

Here we are: modernity. The current condition. This is the trapped subject, the voice crying out in the wilderness, seeking a response from the Everything but getting only the scornful bounce-back of itself.

But then we shift. The cliff across the lake, it turns out, is not a metaphor, or not just a metaphor. It’s an actual (if phantasmagoric) place. It’s like the Great Dismal Swamp: It exists and it super-exists. And now something, or some thing—an “embodiment” (brilliant, terrifying word)—noisily enters the water on the far side of the lake. Splash, and here it comes, paddling toward us—the universe’s reply. And the embodiment, the apprehended sound, that report of something unseen and solid crashing into the lake, now takes a form: “As a great buck it powerfully appeared, / Pushing the crumpled water up ahead.”

[Read: Robert Frost’s poems and essays in The Atlantic]

So Frostian: right between reality (“crumpled”) and otherness. The word antlers is not in the poem, but somehow you see them, the great rearing trees of bone. This buck is a monster—wordless energy, wordless strength—and with its snorting and triumphantly chaotic arrival on the shore, it brings the Message, which is no Message, from the far side. The meaning is there is no meaning. It “landed pouring like a waterfall, / And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, / And forced the underbrush—and that was all.”

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “When Robert Frost Was Bad.”

Illustrations by Jan Robert Dünnweller

On a late summer’s day in Cambridge, England, the writer Ali Smith sat with me on a wooden bench in a patch of garden across from the brick rowhouse where she works. Her new novel, Gliff, was due out before long; she described it as a “dystopian pony book,” clearly pleased to have invented a new genre. She flashed impatience when I suggested that she frequently expresses political views both in her fiction and outside it. After a tart “Do I?” she continued, “I think I’m always in the realm of fiction.” A pause before she allowed, “Well, I’m a citizen.” At that moment, I knocked over the water glass I’d carelessly balanced on one arm of the bench. It shattered, and Smith said merrily, “See what happens when you talk politics?” I apologized, and she told me, “If you want to break another one, I’ll break one with you.”

Funny, cheerfully provocative, at once friendly and sharp-elbowed: That’s Smith in person, and also in her copious fictional output (13 novels and six story collections over the past 30 years). Her books are challenging—experimental and unabashedly literary—yet welcoming to all, eminently readable even when they’re disorienting; they engage the reader, demanding collaboration. (Her fifth novel, published in 2011, has a fill-in-the-blank title: There but for the.) Most writers with a foot in the avant-garde achieve cult status at best; Smith collects awed reviews at home and abroad, wins prizes and honors, and sells lots and lots of books to avid fans.

She breaks rules with gleeful abandon, mocking convention, asking her publisher to do things that the industry instinctively abhors. After Gliff will come Glyph—a pair of homophone titles guaranteed to trip up booksellers and buyers for years to come. (Smith adores wordplay, the quirks of language: puns, rhymes, bizarre etymologies, neologisms, contronyms—words that have developed contradictory meanings.) According to her publisher, the two books will “belong together.” Could she tell me more about Glyph ? “Absolutely not”—she hadn’t yet started writing. I backed off, reminded of a line from Artful (2012), a novel first delivered as a series of Oxford lectures, much of it literally ghostwritten (that is, written by a ghost): “Sequence will always be most of the word consequence.”

I’ve been thinking about Smith for more than 20 years. In 2006, just after her third novel, The Accidental, was named Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I reviewed it, and did a little research. I found a short essay by her fellow novelist Jeanette Winterson in which Smith asks, rhetorically, “Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?” This is what Smith does: First, she confuses you—Who’s talking? When did this happen? Where am I?—then she hooks you with a flash of storytelling genius or a dazzling formal innovation. You read on, and the world seems strange to you, and you seem strange to yourself. The flimsy illusions offered up by conventional literature seem hollow (life is stranger than fiction), as do the certainties you live by (are you yourself truly a coherent character?). You have been reskinned.

The hook sometimes looks like a gimmick. It’s not. At Smith’s behest, her obliging publisher hurried each of the four books of the Seasonal Quartet (2016 to 2020) onto bookstore shelves only about six weeks after she’d delivered each manuscript—an unthinkably quick turnaround. Smith’s ambition, from the time she conceived the project in the 1990s, had been to graft the rush of current events onto the everlasting cycle of the seasons. Soon after she finally sat down to write the first book at the end of 2015 came the United Kingdom’s Brexit crisis. Galvanized by the shock result of the referendum, she told herself as she began to write, “This book has to meet the contemporary head-on, or there’s no point to this sequence of books.” Hence the superfast schedule: Autumn appeared just four months after the vote.

[Read: Ali Smith’s Autumn is a post-Brexit masterpiece]

Although the press labeled it “the first Brexit novel,” the word Brexit is never uttered in the book. A seemingly random yet oddly menacing chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire and security cameras, is erected near an ordinary English village. A woman battles bureaucracy to renew her passport at the local post office; the petty hurdles are dismaying, ominous, comical. Spanish tourists visiting England are heckled at a train station: “This isn’t Europe … Go back to Europe.” Appalled, a sympathetic witness realizes that “what was happening in that one passing incident was a fraction of something volcanic”—a compact summary of Smith’s narrative strategy.

At the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2018, Nicola Sturgeon, then first minister of Scotland, interviewed Smith onstage—since when does a nation’s leader host an experimental novelist at a literary festival?—and read aloud a passage from Autumn that for her perfectly captured the post-referendum mood:

All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d really won. All across the country, people felt they’d done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing. All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU? All across the country, people looked up Google: move to Scotland.

The echo of Dickens (the first line of Autumn is “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times”) carries on and on: 46 consecutive sentences begin with “All across the country.”

Every volume of the Seasonal Quartet was a best seller in the U.K.; the most conspicuously topical of the four, Spring (2019), tackled the “migrant crisis” and reached the top of the Sunday Times best-seller list. Migration has been one of Smith’s abiding concerns. “We’re ignoring it,” she said in an interview more than a dozen years ago. “As our countries and our world become smaller … we’re bordered, everything is about the stranger.” She eventually went to see for herself what detainees in the U.K. are put through and was shocked to find “a razor-wire fence so high and encircling such a tiny yard space that it would pass as a literal example of surreality.” In Spring, a brutal Immigration Removal Centre is described in distressing detail—but Smith also imagines a kind of underground railroad for migrants anxious to avoid the authorities.

Bad guys versus good guys? Part of Smith’s appeal is that she shows us warm-hearted progressive ideals in action, a spirit of inclusion feeding hope and healing hurt. As one character in Spring puts it, “What looks fixed and pinned and closed in a life can change and open.” But nothing in Smith’s fiction is that simple. In Winter, two sisters are mourning the death of their mother. One says, “It takes a death sometimes to make us all live a bit more.” The other thinks, “Platitude, cliché.” If your sympathy is divided, that’s because with Smith, every either/or is complicated by a both/and. A maxim from The Accidental : “The word and is a little bullet of oxygen.”

[Read: Ali Smith spins modernity into myth in Winter]

The stories she tells spill out of stories that spill out of other stories. She’s an inveterate flouter of chronology—a timeline for almost any of her books, including the quartet, would look like a manic Etch A Sketch scribble: Rather than plot or the forward sweep of the clock’s hands, it is Smith’s voice, her many voices, that propels the reader. As though on a whim, she’ll take an unexpected detour into art history or natural history or literary criticism. Finger-on-the-pulse backdrops are balanced by cultural or historical or scientific deep dives. Against the grim tidings of the day, news of pain inflicted by strangers on strangers, she pits, in Spring, the oddly charming tale of Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke spending several weeks in 1922 in the same small Swiss town—and never meeting. A hack screenwriter wants to rework that non-anecdote into an erotic TV costume drama, the two writers screwing in a swinging cable car high above a picturesque snowy valley. Appalled, the director he hopes to hire flees and ends up in the Scottish Highlands, where he crosses paths with the network of people dedicated to helping migrants.

Like every Smith novel, Spring is about human connection, how hard it is—how damned important it is—to acknowledge humanity in the other and embrace it. Yet Smith has talked about how she loves the spirit of alienation in Mansfield’s writing: “Distance, foreignness, knowing you’re out of place or in limbo … and however much you feel at home, you’re fooling yourself, and however strange you feel in the world … it’s natural, it’s the most natural thing.” Sometimes there simply is no connection. Force it, and you get schlock.

When I interviewed Smith for The Paris Review in 2017, a few years after the Scottish-independence referendum, she told me, “I like edges but not borders.” Born in Inverness in 1962 and raised by an Irish mother and an English father, she calls herself “Scottish by formation” (quoting another of her heroes, the Scottish-born Muriel Spark). “I grew up on the margins,” she said. “I inherited all the value of the margins.” Her working-class parents brought her up in council housing. She was much younger than her four siblings, and looking back, she recognized that she’d had “a remarkably lucky childhood, cosseted and bullied both in that lovely family way, with nobody following me, no rivalries.” Her parents had both won scholarships, but had been obliged to leave school to go to work. They were adamant that their children would be educated. All five graduated from university.

“I was a proficient, happy, versatile child,” Smith told me. She went to Roman Catholic primary school, then a state-run high school. She read all the time. “I thought of myself as a poet through my teens,” she confessed to another interviewer. “I was pretty dreadful.” At the University of Aberdeen, she studied English literature and language, graduating with highest honors. She then spent five years studying for a Ph.D. at Newnham College, Cambridge. Alongside her studies, she wrote plays; Sarah Wood, who became her life partner, directed five of them. The doctorate, meanwhile, never materialized. Her examiners requested changes to her dissertation on three Modernist masters (James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams); she refused. She was nevertheless offered two teaching jobs, and accepted the one at the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow.

That stint lasted 18 months, cut short by a debilitating bout of chronic fatigue syndrome. At the time, the illness felt “like I’d been hit from the back with a baseball bat—after which I … went into a kind of physical breakdown.” Smith returned to Cambridge to recover, but the symptoms lingered, resurfacing intermittently. Though she found it painful to write longhand, she scratched out her first collection, Free Love and Other Stories (1995), which scooped up a couple of prizes. She persuaded her publisher, Virago, to take a chance on her debut novel, Like (1997), and from then on, she was a writer only.

Her second novel, Hotel World (2001), was shortlisted for both the Booker and Orange Prizes, success of the kind that heralds a major career. In The Guardian, the novelist Giles Foden wrote, “I have never seen the tenets of recent literary theory (the impossibility of the coherent subject, or substantive character, for instance) so cleverly insinuated into a novel.” It begins with the voice of a ghost. A teenage chambermaid working at a fancy hotel in a dour northern city has fallen down a dumbwaiter shaft to her death. Her ghost, itching to feel again (“What I want more than anything in the world is to have a stone in my shoe”), would like to know how long it took her to fall:

(and this time I’d throw myself willingly down it wooo-

hooooo and this time I’d count as I went, one elephant two eleph-ahh) if I could feel it again, how I hit it, the basement, from four floors up, from toe to head, dead. Dead leg. Dead arm. Dead hand. Dead eye. Dead I, four floors between me and the world, that’s all it took to take me, that’s the measure of it, the length and death of it, the short goodb—.

A classic, manically ludic Smith passage, grim and comical, pushing at the edge of too much, yet as easy to swallow as a spoonful of honey.

Having given voice to the dead, Smith takes it away; the ghost girl is losing her ability to speak, losing language. Her last message to the living:

Remember you must live.
Remember you most love.
Remainder you mist leaf.

When I asked Smith about the legion of ghosts in her fiction, she shrugged and said, “I just don’t think death makes that much difference.” Sounding like Gertrude Stein, she elaborated: “We carry with us all the people who have made us and the people we make and the lives we make, and the world we make continues on from what we make of it.”

The realm of fiction where Smith says she “always” dwells is mostly populated by family and friends, the people we’re most comfortable with, who also drive us crazy. Often the setting is the home we long for and can’t wait to escape. The premise of The Accidental—borrowed from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film, Teorema—is the reskinning of an unhappy bourgeois family: mother, son, daughter, and stepfather. In musical notation, an “accidental” changes the pitch. In the novel, the accidental—the catalyst—is a mysterious character who rings the doorbell and announces, “Sorry I’m late. I’m Amber. Car broke down.” Though she’s very much flesh and blood (her flesh is desired by every family member, young, old, male, female), this uninvited guest might as well be a ghost, an inexplicable apparition with uncanny powers. The daughter thinks of Amber as “the kind of superheroine that can draw things to her and repel them away from her at the same time.”

Jan Robert Dünnweller

The reader watches as the family’s world disintegrates, and the idea, I believe, is that the reader molts in sympathy. The daughter, in her old skin, needs everything to be mediated, filtered, distanced. A bright, lonely 12-year-old, she’s obsessed with her video camera (and has a verbal tic, using i.e. ad nauseam). Amber drops the girl’s camera from a pedestrian bridge onto a busy highway below—deliberately. Amber does everything deliberately. In her new skin, the younger girl accepts that “her responsibility” is about “actually seeing, being there.” That may sound like a New Age mantra, but the transformation, slight and subtle, is also plausible and moving. The parents fare less well; the fractured family will never be whole again. (Smith doesn’t do happy endings.)

In my mind, the 12-year-old from The Accidental reappears, four years older and much sadder (her mother has died), in my favorite Smith book, How to be both (2014), a novel in two parts published in vice-versa editions: with the same cover, but with the order of the parts reversed—in effect, different novels packaged identically and released simultaneously. This older girl, George, is also bright and lonely, and she’s pedantically fixated on correct grammar—“a finite set of rules,” she insists. George, too, will be reskinned. Among other things, she slowly discovers her erotic love for another girl. Her evolution is watched over by the ghost of an actual Italian quattrocento painter from Ferrara, Francesco del Cossa.

One part of How to be both is narrated by the bewildered painter, who can’t comprehend 21st-century England and decides he’s in an afterlife “purgatorium,” condemned to traipse after George, whom he mistakes at first for a boy. The other part is told from George’s perspective, close third-person. She remains unaware of the ghostly observer who’s following her around. Which part you read first depends on which edition you happen to have bought, and to discover which sequence works best, you’ll have to reread. Should the tale of a 600-year-old artist, with its technical asides on the art of the fresco, come before the tale of modern-day teenage angst? Do the parts of the puzzle fit either way?

The painter’s confusion about George’s gender is an ironic echo (or foreshadowing) of the backstory Smith has invented for him: He was born a girl but disguised himself as a boy to become a painter. (“Nobody will take you for such a training wearing the clothes of a woman,” warned his father, a brickmaker.) The adventures of this talented cross-dresser make a mockery of binary ideas about gender. What the painter learned centuries ago in Ferrara, what George learns in 21st-century London, is that no finite set of rules applies.

Back on the sunny Cambridge bench, Smith told me about the origins of Gliff, which is full of characteristic quirks and revisits her abiding concerns—gender, boundaries, the importance of unmediated engagement with the world. But it’s darker fiction, with some acutely painful passages. It began as a short story written “very fast” in August 2023, a commission for an anthology: “I was supposed to write something that was tangentially Kafkaesque,” she explained, after which she turned to work on a new novel. But she was ambushed by a “horrendous” bout of insomnia, “three months of almost no sleep,” and realized that she was writing the wrong book, and that the short story “was not going away, was waiting, rather like characters do, at the back of your head.”

Where did the title come from? “I was playing about online one day thinking, Is this a nonsense word or not? And I looked up the word that sounded like glyph but was spelled differently, and found out it wasn’t a made-up word—it was actually a northern word, a Scottish word.” It has many meanings, among them a glimpse, a sudden fright, or a brief moment. It’s also the name of the horse in this dystopian pony book, but we’ll get to that.

A glyph is a mark—as Smith said, “The smallest unit of meaning,” a scratch on a cave wall, an ornamental carving on a primitive tool. In the Paris Review interview, when I asked about the building blocks of her prose, Smith explained that “the rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it—the word, the phrase, the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it.” Now she’s taken the next step, training her attention on the gesture that precedes even the syllable. In Gliff, she shows us prehistoric cave art and the head of a horse carved many thousands of years ago onto a rib bone.

She also steps for the first time into the near future: A brutal totalitarian state has been rounding up, interning, and reeducating people whom the regime deems “unverifiable.” The climate is as much Orwell as Kafka: 24/7 surveillance, grotesque euphemisms, justified paranoia. Britain’s not quite there yet—but, Smith insisted, “could be.” She added, sitting up taller, “If we just raise our heads from thinking it’s not happening, we’d see that most of the book is happening right now somewhere.”

The authorities have started drawing red lines around the unwanted unverifiables—literally. They have a comically low-tech machine called a “supera bounder” that applies paint around houses, around vehicles. Demarcated houses are demolished, vehicles towed away: rapacious capitalism combining punishment and profit.

Two siblings, a young teenager and a younger sister, more or less abandoned in an empty house, find themselves on the wrong side of the red line. The older sibling—our narrator, Bri, cautious and protective—worries about the meager supply of canned food, and tries hard to lift the spirits of the younger one, who finds seven horses in a nearby field, one of which, a gray gelding, she adopts (or is adopted by). She gives him his name.

Gliff the horse is the moral center of Gliff the novel, and also the occasion of some arresting descriptions:

The grey horse’s bones were close to its skin all over it and it seemed huge even though it was quite a small horse, the smallest one in this field. It moved with laidback strength and with a real weightiness though it wasn’t weighty at all, it was as spare as a bare tree …

The eye was shocking.

It was really beautiful.

You could see light in its dark, and it also had in it, both at once, two things I had never seen together in one place, gentleness, and—what?

Five years later, in a moment of crisis, Bri realizes that the missing word is “equanimity.”

When Smith was a child in Inverness, about 4 or 5 years old, she discovered a stable behind an ice rink. “Between the age of 7 and 11,” she said, “I went every Saturday in the summer and hung out. We did do a little grooming—very small ponies in my case. What I know about horses all comes from that place at the back of the ice rink, where 12 or 13 horses lived in the field.” She paused. “You know, being on the back of a horse teaches you everything about everything.”

The writing about Gliff the horse does more than bring the living creature into focus. “His mouth was decisive without force, a soft lipped line. It made him look resigned, noncommittal, but also poised, as if waiting.” That “soft lipped line” is the antithesis of the supera bounder’s garish, excluding red. Yet Smith is in the business of complicating binaries as well as erasing boundaries; she won’t tolerate a simple dichotomy.

Which brings us back to the two siblings. The younger one is Rose, wild, fiercely loyal, fiercely stubborn. Bri, kind and caring and, like so many of Smith’s characters, obsessed with words and their meaning, is also Briar or Brice. (“Why did I myself really like having more than one name, as if I had more than one self?”) When asked, bluntly but without malice, “Are you a boy or a girl?,” the answer is, “Yes I am.”

Flash-forward five years and—a spoiler follows—Bri now serves the state. Reeducated? Lured by the promise of elevated status? Tortured? It’s not clear what has happened, but Bri is complicit in the horrors of the regime, and this lover of words has been silenced: “That’s as much of that story as I care to tell. One line about it is more than enough.” The unspoken, the unspeakable, is more frightening than anything else in the novel.

Four cats patrol the alley next to where Smith and her partner live and work. The cats came and went, occasionally pausing near our bench to lick a paw and ignore us ostentatiously. I wondered which ones were hers, and she said, approvingly, “They kind of live everywhere.”

[From the April 2023 issue: Adam Begley on why you should be reading Sebastian Barry]

I asked again about politics, suggesting mildly that sometimes she deploys her dazzling skills in the service of ideology. In Winter, she quotes Keats: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” Does she agree? “Fiction’s only agenda is to be fiction,” she replied, “but lies have an agenda.” Her soft, lilting voice was buttressed by quiet conviction: “All you do is tell the story. What you do is write and write, and you tell the story that arrives—and it really is like being on the back of a horse.” But what about the wild complexity of her narratives, the abrupt swerves and unannounced excursions? As though to allow for nuance, she said, “Of course it will be political when it’s written, because everything is. But I believe deep in my own bones that story is about something that cancels division between us.” She added, “We cross those lines every time we listen to someone or are heard by someone.”

Some early reviewers of Gliff have complained that it feels too “on the nose.” The book’s horrors—climate catastrophe, internment camps, genocidal wars, high-tech surveillance—are too familiar to serve as prophecy. Is it fair to complain that the future is almost already upon us? Who needs prophecy when dystopia is now? The novel thrums with Smith’s urgent need to tell a story about where our divided present could lead us. “We cannot look away at the moment,” she said to me. “We must not look away from the darkness. And if I didn’t look at the dark, what kind of a writer would I be?”

* Lead-image sources: Lorentz Gullachsen / Contour by Getty; Leonardo Cendamo / Getty.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “The Experimentalist.”

At least the fever came on a Friday. Or at least that’s what I, an absolute fool, thought when my nine-month-old, Evan, spiked a 102-degree temperature after I picked him up from day care recently. That meant he’d have three days to recover and would be back at day care on Monday.

When the fever rose to 104 on Saturday, my husband and I grew concerned, and when it persisted on Sunday, we took him to urgent care. They diagnosed Evan with an ear infection and prescribed antibiotics, which should take “a day or two” to work, the doctor said.

Okay, fine; we would miss a day of work. Our jobs, thank God, are flexible about such things.

Except on Tuesday, Evan still had a fever. His ear infection had not gone away, and in fact had worsened to the point that he refused to eat or drink and screamed whenever he was laid down. On Wednesday, the doctor switched him to a new antibiotic. That Friday, a mere 48 hours away, I had to go record my audiobook, in a recording session that my publisher had already booked and paid for.

[Annie Lowrey: Why I can’t put down the vacuum]

Before we had Evan, my husband, Rich, and I had discussed such exigencies using Fair Play, a popular system—in the form of a book and card game—for divvying up chores. It aims to help women in heterosexual relationships, who tend to take on more household cognitive and physical labor, offload tasks onto their partner. Rich was assigned researching backup child care, for whenever our son was inevitably sick and could not attend day care.

The thing is, Rich never did research backup child care. Before people have kids, they don’t realize that parenting is like running a complex military operation in addition to holding down your regular job. He figured we wouldn’t need backup care, and because I was tired and pregnant and swamped with millions of other tasks, I didn’t do the research for him. So here we found ourselves.

Which is why, when Rich asked me, four days into Evan’s fever, as we were syringing Tylenol into his wailing mouth at 2 a.m., “What are we gonna do?” I very reasonably responded, “I don’t know, dickhead! What the fuck are we gonna do?”

I had done what the pop-feminist chore-management gurus suggested. I had tried to reduce my mental load by foisting ownership of and accountability for tasks onto my husband. The only slight hiccup in this plan is that if your husband doesn’t do the tasks, the system falls apart.

The problem, as both Fair Play’s author, Eve Rodsky, and I, and probably lots of other women, see it, is the men. Our husbands or male partners, enlightened though they may be, don’t notice what needs to be done, or they forget to do it, or they don’t know how to do it. This requires the woman to act as project manager, reminding her husband to clean the baby’s humidifier or to grab the yogurt snacks, and so on and so forth, as long as you both shall live.

In theory, Fair Play offers a good solution. The best-selling 2019 book, and its companion card deck, lay out all the chores a family could conceivably have—everything from buying birthday gifts to doing the dishes to taking out the trash—on 100 cards, which the couple is meant to divide. Though the resulting division might not quite be 50–50, it should feel equitable. Rodsky writes that the man in the relationship should take at least 21 cards. She told me that a popular way to keep track of who has which card is through the software program Trello.

Each person is to take complete “ownership” of their card, including its “conception, planning, and execution.” The same person remembers that it’s time to clean the countertops, finds the cleaning liquid, and actually uses it.

Of course, people’s definition of “clean” varies, and many women have higher standards when it comes to tidiness and caretaking. Single, childless women tend to do more housework than single, childless men. Rodsky addresses this through something called the “minimum standard of care,” or a basic level of competence for each task that both spouses agree upon in advance. This means no cramming all the Tupperware into a Jenga tower if the MSC, as it is known, calls for it to be stacked neatly. (Left mostly unresolved is what to do if you can’t agree on a minimum standard of care, or if one partner doesn’t live up to it.) You maintain this system through regular check-ins with your spouse, at which you assess how things are going and re-deal the cards if necessary.

Sure, this may sound like romance by McKinsey—a friend of mine called these chore check-ins “deeply unsexy”—but hundreds of thousands of people have bought the book or card deck. Couples seem to really need a way to talk about household labor, and Rodsky offers one.

Rodsky, a married mother of three based in Los Angeles, worked as a lawyer and philanthropic adviser before she developed Fair Play. She got the idea, she writes, when one day after she had hustled out the door with a bag of snacks, a FedEx package, a pair of kids’ shoes to be returned, and a client contract—literally with her hands full—her husband texted her, “I’m surprised you didn’t get blueberries.” She was doing so much, but apparently she should have been doing the blueberries too.

It made her realize that despite a successful career, “I was still the she-fault parent charged with doing it all, buying the blueberries and masterminding our family’s day-to-day life while my husband … was still not much more than a ‘helper.’”

For the book, she interviewed hundreds of couples and immersed herself in research about the division of household labor. She came away with a set of facts and observations that may make you want to set your bra on fire and run off to a lesbian commune. Men hate to be nagged but, Rodsky writes, when pressed in interviews, they admit that they wait for their wife to tell them what to do around the house. Countless studies show that women do much more unpaid labor—housework and child care—than men do, even when both work outside the home. Rodsky cites a study showing that after couples who claim to be egalitarian have a baby, men cut back on the amount of housework they do by five hours a week. In part because of this disparity, working women, on average, see their incomes cut in half after having children.

You may be thinking “not all men,” but it’s an awful lot of men. Several studies show that women score higher on two facets of the conscientiousness personality trait: orderliness and dutifulness. In layman’s terms, this means women like things neater than men do, on average, and they pay more attention to the rules and structure of home life.

Explanations for this phenomenon vary. It could be that women are socialized from girlhood to be cleaner and more organized, and are judged in adulthood for having a messy home more than men are. Socialization might have contributed to my own orderliness: My parents are immigrants who, from what I can tell, have never taken a gender-studies course. When I told my mom about the Fair Play system, she said, “That’s dog nonsense. Men don’t know what to do with kids. Especially your man.”

It could be that because women bear disproportionate costs of childbearing in the form of pregnancy, birth, and in many cases breastfeeding, many feel more invested. They may pay greater attention to their children, and their various needs and proclivities, than the kids’ father does. And men tend to earn more than women, so when one person’s work has to take a hit for the kids’ sake, it’s usually the woman’s. Rodsky quotes one father as saying, “I’m so proud of how well my wife balances work with her family life.” Her family life.

I heard about Fair Play during the pandemic, and I thought it could help settle the chore wars that had been simmering between Rich and me for years already. Within a few weeks, we’d read the book, bought the cards, and scheduled a weekly check-in on our Google Calendars. It worked for a while. But after I got pregnant, I suddenly felt the need to, for example, research the difference between strollers and “travel systems,” while Rich did not. We thus found it virtually impossible to play fairly for more than a few weeks at a time. After Evan was born, it didn’t seem possible at all.

To name just a few of 10,000 examples: Rich was in charge of cleaning the floors, but he forgot to do it unless I asked. We hired a cleaning lady. He forgot to pay the cleaning lady. The cleaning lady texted me to ask about getting paid. I would task him with taking Evan to a doctor appointment (which I had made), and he would forget the diaper bag. Mentally, I willed Evan to have a huge blowout in the waiting room, just to teach him a lesson.

Perhaps these are personal foibles, specific to me and my husband. But the broader system—and indeed, any system of this kind—seems like it would crumble for any couple operating under the pressures of modern life, especially if you don’t live near family.

Let’s say you’re holding the “dinner” card, but you really need help with the execution part—peeling the potatoes—because you got stuck on a work call. According to Rodsky, what you’re supposed to do in this case is ask for help from “someone in your village other than your partner.” The problem, of course, is that I, and so many other moms, don’t have a village. My parents live a flight away. Rich’s parents are dead. We have no other family nearby, and we have to drive an hour to see most of our friends. Often, I’m “assigning” Rich tasks, even if they’re technically my “job,” because I’m literally holding a crying baby and no one else is available to help.

Rodsky herself seems deeply empathetic to people who don’t have the money or time to maintain a perfectly run household. She grew up with a single mother, so financially pinched that they used trash bags as luggage. She told me that when she would go into the kitchen at night to get her disabled brother some water, she would close her eyes for a second to allow the cockroaches time to scatter off the piles of dirty dishes.

On our call, Rodsky suggested that one solution might be thinking of your village as a neighbor or even a friendly security guard at a local store—two individuals her own mother relied on for occasional help when she was a girl. But I don’t know my neighbors or my local shopkeepers well enough to do this.

Rich and I have also struggled with the minimum standard of care. At one point, Rich tried to convince me that floors don’t actually need mopping. They can just be dirty! Rodsky suggests that, in situations like these, you should “collaborate on what is reasonable within your own home,” ultimately reverting to a “reasonable person” standard from jurisprudence. But the problem is that in our home, and in many others, there is no judge or jury. We are prosecutor and defense attorney, and there’s no verdict in sight.

A recent study of the Fair Play system conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California found that the system did work—at least among the couples who actually applied it. When participants in the study completed the Fair Play program and divided the household labor more equitably, their mental health improved, their burnout decreased, and their relationship quality improved. But here’s the rub: Only about a quarter of the participants actually completed the Fair Play program. Darby Saxbe, a USC psychologist and an author of the study, told me that participants might have dropped out because they didn’t pay for or even actively seek out the program; they were offered it. Or perhaps being overwhelmed with parenting and domestic labor didn’t leave a lot of time for divvying up parenting and domestic labor. Still, Saxbe thinks the program is worth considering, especially before couples have kids. “We know domestic labor is a huge reason that a lot of women initiate divorce and separation, but we don’t have a lot of great solutions,” she told me.

Allison Daminger, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin who studies the division of household labor, told me Fair Play is the program she tends to refer people to when they tell her they’re struggling with chore management. But people who seek it out, she said, often struggle with “overload, maybe some conflict in the relationship.” These are the very things that become hurdles to doing Fair Play.

I asked Rodsky what to do if your partner just doesn’t do his cards—the issue that my husband and I keep running into. Rodsky told me this can mean that the partner who does do their cards has poor boundaries. “They haven’t really done that internal work yet to really understand what a boundary means,” she says. “What are they willing to accept?” Rodsky says that for her, setting a boundary meant telling her husband, “I’m not willing to live like that anymore.”

But I am willing to live this way. I’m not getting divorced, because there is too much work to do. Right now a helper is worse than a co-pilot, but it’s better than nothing. And, well, when we’re not screaming at each other about Clorox wipes, we do like each other.

Daminger also suggested doing some “deep work” to understand why a (hypothetical) husband (but actually mine) wasn’t doing his fair share. It could be that “you and your partner have very different underlying goals and intentions,” Daminger said. “And I think if that’s the case, then systems for dividing up tasks better are probably not going to be effective.”

[Joe Pinsker: The gender researcher’s guide to an equal marriage]

When reached for comment, Rich called this article “very good” and “delightful,” but admitted that he has “a vastly different thinking pattern around what is clean and what isn’t clean.” Then he pointed out that he, unbidden, cleans “both sides of the garbage-disposal cover.” Then we got into a fight about how often he initiates Swiffering without being asked.

The more I talked with Rodsky and Daminger, the worse I felt. I felt bad for having an imperfect husband and an imperfect life. Why didn’t I know my neighbor well enough for her to be my village? Why did I marry a sloppy guy who doesn’t Swiffer? Why did I have a baby if I don’t have good boundaries, or even a Trello account? I came away with the conclusion that Rich and I are just not very compatible in this way, and that to approach compatibility would take a whopping amount of couple’s therapy that we don’t have time for right now.

Instead, our strategy is not one that Rodsky would like. I bark out orders, and Rich kinda-sorta fulfills them, most of the time. He doesn’t understand Evan’s needs the way I do, and it would be too hard for me to explain them to him. I’m pickier and cleaner than he is, and it will probably always be this way. Rodsky referred to this kind of thinking as being “complicit in your own oppression.” I call it getting our kid to middle school in one piece.

There is another element to it, though. During that frightening, feverish week, I spent hours swabbing Evan’s forehead with a cold washcloth and, because it hurt his ears to nurse, giving him sips of breast milk from a cup—his first-ever drink from something other than a bottle. I had to admit that part of me liked cuddling him and easing his distress—even if it was technically Rich’s turn to be on duty. It was mental, emotional, and physical labor that didn’t pay and that I, on some level, enjoyed. It wasn’t fair. But life rarely is.