"Unstable, in Chaos": Reading Ali Smith’s <em>How to Be Both</em> and Percival Everett’s <em>Telephone</em> in the Age of Cruel Optimism

Many of the formal innovations of contemporary fiction arise from a collective sense of ceaseless crisis—a recognition that traditional modes of storytelling, forged in earlier cultural climates, may now be overrun and unable to accommodate an age of accelerated instability. This essay examines two such formally adventurous novels: Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014) and Percival Everett’s Telephone (2020), both of which employ multiple published versions to unsettle narrative unity and readerly expectations. Smith’s novel appears in two randomly sequenced editions; Everett’s in three distinct iterations. The essay argues that such strategies may be seen as responses to the condition Lauren Berlant terms “cruel optimism”: a structure of feeling in which attachments to normative fantasies of the good life persist, despite their increasing impossibility. In foregrounding variation, contingency, and aesthetic instability, these novels register what Berlant describes as a cultural moment shaped by “austerity, precarity, and awkwardness,” and reflect the experience of a world in which the genres of meaning-making are themselves in question. They do so, however, not by offering resolution, but by inhabiting the impasse—what Berlant elsewhere calls “genre flailing” - and devising alternative modes of formal coherence in the face of disruption. The result is fiction that portrays the very crisis that structurally forms it.