Zadie
“After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.” ― Ann Richards
I always love reading Zadie Smith. Her books never seem to go anywhere, but then they do. (I realize that's a frustratingly obvious sentence, but it's true.)
Having just finished her newest book Swing Time, I don't know yet what to think about it. The writing is simple, conscious of our era of email addiction, and the chapters are short. The book is divided into sections with titles like "Early Days" or "Early and Late Days," which seem haphazard. They feel like loose ways of arranging narrative based on however Zadie felt at the time ... and for the most part, strangely, I am OK with this. I like to see Mrs. Smith wander, to think, to go basically nowhere plot-wise. Some people will hate this -- there are those who always despise stories that trade thought for plot. Such readers believe stories with no orthodox arc are the "wrong type" of story, maybe because these structures are atypical, challenging, which smacks of elitism.
But this may be a book written in "elitist" style that also addresses elitism directly as a theme. The main character, who is somehow not ever named, grows up with a black Jamaican mother and a white father in 1980s London. She partners up with a domineering, vain friend named Tracey, who is also biracial, and who loves to dance.
The art of dance is woven into the story with joy and honesty. It's really fun to read any passage in Swing Time that talks about dance, because it's so clear Zadie had fun writing it.
The protagonist (I'll call her NR, for narrator) has a naively passionate boss, a famous pop star named Aimee, who sees her self as a dancer since her voice is mostly produced in the studio. She becomes taken with the idea of founding a women's school in Africa, and then, with the whim of the obscenely rich, just makes it happen. (The country is not named, and the Western habit of lumping all African countries into the term "Africa" is also talked about in the book. )
This "humanitarian" trip opens the door to some lively and peaceful African dancing scenes, not the least of which is an elaborately costumed man starting a party in the street before taking the young village boys off to be ritualistically circumcised. (You don't see any snipping, luckily.)
There is also a sort of love triangle, which is not that interesting. From what I have read of Zadie, her attempts at outright "plot" tend to be her least inspired writing. You get the sense that she feels she "has to" include some degree of conflict or arc, or that her publisher/agent/whoever has begged her to add some "momentum" to the mix. The people involved in the triangle are Aimee, an African teacher named Lamin, and an African woman named Hawa. The latter two characters seem sketchily drawn, distant in some way. Of course, part of the story involves Westerners' pathetically offensive ideas about Africa (i.e., lack of knowledge), but Lamin never really seems to form as a character. It might be the 1st-person POV format, meaning we're always stuck in NR's mind, but people like Lamin and Hawa feel more like narrative objects, moved about for this or that pre-arranged purpose. (And here I said there wasn't much plot.)
This distant treatment is ironic in one way, because the concept of treating people like objects crops up in the book, most overtly with Aimee's selfish treatment of all her staff: they exist for her. (Of course, I could also just be ignorant/unsuited to African characters, and am missing something integral here, which is not dissimilar to NR's African experience.)
At many points I found myself asking, "Why is this happening?" while reading Swing Time, and the happy answer was, "I have no idea, but it's so pleasant I don't care."
NR herself seems sketchy at times, although we get tons of her memories, mainly from childhood through adolescence. She is very inward-focused, tending to avoid people, but the people she does interact with fill up her life and affect it deeply.
In fact, when I think about it, NR is often dominated by others. Her mother is highly outspoken, stern, and studies constantly to become a member of the "intellectual" class, a pursuit which often matters more than the day-to-day feats of mothering. For the majority of their relationship, she dominates her daughter with unending streams of political theory, history, and polemic. Then, too, a young (and teenage, and even adult) Tracey dominates NR, telling her what to do, oppressing her with more words, forcing her to play second-banana to this outspoken, but perhaps equally insecure girl.
Then, of course, there is Aimee, whose selfishness is staggering, although not so staggering that I can't relate to her. All three of these women have moments of beauty and integrity, often coupled with the signature boldness and defiance that seem to link them all together.
And speaking of selfishness, even NR grows aware of her own privileged behavior, especially when it's held up against the impoverished African villages. (For instance, she wastes an entire liter of water flushing a cockroach down the toilet, knowing people had to walk several miles to fetch it. Later, there is also a discussion over whether the village should even be called "impoverished," when family values and community seem to be so strong ... there is more than one kind of wealth, as one character says, and constantly viewing African countries as categorically "poor" is its own form of privilege/racism.)
For the most part, though, NR's mom, Tracey, and Aimee shut out NR's needs and focus on themselves. They are casually selfish, whether it's the Jamaican immigrant mother who becomes an MP, or an aging Australian icon.
In another way, though, NR's life is very lucky. She has relationships with both parents, even if the conversations can be strained. Tracey, on the other hand, was raised by a single mother; her dad is a deadbeat criminal who avoids any but the most casual relationship. NR is also fortunate enough to attend college, where she doesn't do much except smoke weed and break up with an another oppressive figure, a young black man obsessed with numerology. Then she gets a cushy job at a TV station (this section is somehow exciting even though she does nothing) and eventually her position with Aimee, which involves both drudgery and luxury: she must do all the grunt work to care for Aimee, but she also benefits from private flights and worldwide travel.
NR's transformation from slightly unfocused, bookish teen to stressed-out millennial international white collar worker (there's a mouthful) feels strange, because it's not too much of a transformation. She doesn't change much in terms of behavior, except for becoming more attached to her phone. She is still loath to create relationships, she still finds it hard to speak to her mother, and she is still bafflingly obsessed with her friend Tracey, who achieves minor stardom in bit dance roles before fizzling out into an Internet troll.
It is this relationship with Tracey that is meant to be the core one, the fulcrum on which everything turns, but why? All because of a random moment in which a childhood friendship sparked? Because they were both half-white and half-black and lived close to each other and both wanted to dance (although only Tracey was good)? Maybe that's enough reason. After all, our earliest friendships start by the chance of convenience (neighbors, or a shared class), and they can embed themselves in our brains forever by the mere fact of occurring when we're young and still in development.
The meaning of the Tracey relationship is puzzling, and yet, as I've said, also comforting. Zadie is a humble master of adding detail and fleshing out characters' lives without you realizing it: before I knew it, several hundred pages had passed, and I felt well-versed in Tracey's anxieties and dreams, her wish to be seen as posh and elite when she is young, and her intense teenage acting-out. The transformation into furious online verbal abuser isn't handled directly -- in the frequent time shifts that mark the book, an older Tracey merely reappears as an unemployed, vocal believer in government conspiracies. This time-shifting partly contributes to that "distant" feeling hanging around several characters (Tracey is saved from this by the heavy focus on her childhood, but Lamin and Hawa, who enter the book later in the game, are not so lucky).
Now, haven't I contradicted myself? Zadie fleshes characters out, but also makes them feel distant? I think this paradox is true when speaking about her people. There is a clinical side to Zadie's writing, the scholar or academic, and at times there is a lack of emotion that negatively affects the whole "fun" part of reading a book. NR spends a decent amount of time being in a kind of anemic mildly bewildered shock, not precisely emoting, more chronicling what passes before her. This does fit in with her history as someone passed-over, relegated to sidekick, but it's not always enjoyable to read. (Which brings up the debate between logical consistency and enjoyability in writing, which is for another time ... basically is it better to create a work that makes "sense," or one that does its job of entertaining?)
I feel like my essay is a poor imitation of Zadie's book, because it's taking its time, wandering, while sort of hoping deep-down it will make a point. And make no mistake, Zadie does make a point. Her ending is beautiful; it was totally expected and unexpected (paradox alert) to me, and most importantly, it took me from feeling kind of uncertain and almost irritated to feeling thrilled. Zadie is capable of this: she can lull you into a bemused state of quasi-meditation, and then shatter your little brain with a beautiful phrase, a heartfelt action from a character. Her ending made me believe in things, gave my own tepid brain hope for another day, which is worth the admission price right there.
Zadie cares, and this caring shows through in her people. The portrait she paints of NR's mother, for instance, is realistic and beautiful. An admirable woman with her own domineering faults, a leftist-literature-reading protester who can defend her daughter fiercely from school administrators, but who also passes harsh judgements about others, including NR herself. These judgements haunt NR through the book, and it is to the book's credit that they do: Mrs. Smith does an excellent job of reproducing the anxieties of the human mind, of images and memories that more or less live inside you all the time, defining the system by which you see the world, until, little by little, perhaps you can break away.
We see very little of the breaking away, at least until the final pages, but like I said: the ending was excellent. I didn't expect it to be so good, actually, and I know I'm hyping this up so people who read it may think "ah, I don't see the big deal" because Zadie never goes for over-dramatized catharsis, or a Hollywood explosion. What she does do is tweak the proceedings a bit, making the story move into uncharted territory. Zadie, to me, seems fascinated by the world, and all the strange things in it, and it is comforting (and mind-expanding) to watch her wander around with a magnifying glass and ask questions.
There's so much more to this novel, especially with regards to its treatment of race, but I'll leave you with a maybe-not-exceptionally brief coda: the title Swing Time comes from a Fred Astaire movie. As a child, NR becomes obsessed with Fred and his dance moves, even though Tracey isn't impressed by the oldtime routines. The incorporation of film, video, and music into the book is another cool (and odd) component, since there are quite a few scenes when NR is just summarizing what's happening onscreen. The idea of writing about film (ekphrasis, my favorite word!) is nothing new, but when I saw Zadie Smith in Washington, DC, I heard her say she didn't feel the need to elaborate on the context of Fred Astaire's movies or Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video because we live in a world where we can Google anything. In this way, the Internet is a weird extension of the book, since it was written with the awareness of our technological ease in looking things up.
This might seem like a throwaway stylistic choice, but it hearkens back to the old days of a common reading list, when you could drop Shakespeare quotes in public dialogue and know that many people would understand it. (To be fair, back in the day it was exclusively wealthy white guys talking to other middle-class-and-above white guys about their commonly shared learning, but you get what I'm saying.) Except here, though, is a 21st-century version, a common language that exists outside of our heads, on the Internet. We might not know the quote Zadie is talking about, but we can look it up in two seconds on our smartphones. We can watch the videos she's describing and add to our experience of the novel.
Like this!
I always love reading Zadie Smith. Her books never seem to go anywhere, but then they do. (I realize that's a frustratingly obvious sentence, but it's true.)
Having just finished her newest book Swing Time, I don't know yet what to think about it. The writing is simple, conscious of our era of email addiction, and the chapters are short. The book is divided into sections with titles like "Early Days" or "Early and Late Days," which seem haphazard. They feel like loose ways of arranging narrative based on however Zadie felt at the time ... and for the most part, strangely, I am OK with this. I like to see Mrs. Smith wander, to think, to go basically nowhere plot-wise. Some people will hate this -- there are those who always despise stories that trade thought for plot. Such readers believe stories with no orthodox arc are the "wrong type" of story, maybe because these structures are atypical, challenging, which smacks of elitism.
But this may be a book written in "elitist" style that also addresses elitism directly as a theme. The main character, who is somehow not ever named, grows up with a black Jamaican mother and a white father in 1980s London. She partners up with a domineering, vain friend named Tracey, who is also biracial, and who loves to dance.
The art of dance is woven into the story with joy and honesty. It's really fun to read any passage in Swing Time that talks about dance, because it's so clear Zadie had fun writing it.
The protagonist (I'll call her NR, for narrator) has a naively passionate boss, a famous pop star named Aimee, who sees her self as a dancer since her voice is mostly produced in the studio. She becomes taken with the idea of founding a women's school in Africa, and then, with the whim of the obscenely rich, just makes it happen. (The country is not named, and the Western habit of lumping all African countries into the term "Africa" is also talked about in the book. )
This "humanitarian" trip opens the door to some lively and peaceful African dancing scenes, not the least of which is an elaborately costumed man starting a party in the street before taking the young village boys off to be ritualistically circumcised. (You don't see any snipping, luckily.)
There is also a sort of love triangle, which is not that interesting. From what I have read of Zadie, her attempts at outright "plot" tend to be her least inspired writing. You get the sense that she feels she "has to" include some degree of conflict or arc, or that her publisher/agent/whoever has begged her to add some "momentum" to the mix. The people involved in the triangle are Aimee, an African teacher named Lamin, and an African woman named Hawa. The latter two characters seem sketchily drawn, distant in some way. Of course, part of the story involves Westerners' pathetically offensive ideas about Africa (i.e., lack of knowledge), but Lamin never really seems to form as a character. It might be the 1st-person POV format, meaning we're always stuck in NR's mind, but people like Lamin and Hawa feel more like narrative objects, moved about for this or that pre-arranged purpose. (And here I said there wasn't much plot.)
This distant treatment is ironic in one way, because the concept of treating people like objects crops up in the book, most overtly with Aimee's selfish treatment of all her staff: they exist for her. (Of course, I could also just be ignorant/unsuited to African characters, and am missing something integral here, which is not dissimilar to NR's African experience.)
At many points I found myself asking, "Why is this happening?" while reading Swing Time, and the happy answer was, "I have no idea, but it's so pleasant I don't care."
NR herself seems sketchy at times, although we get tons of her memories, mainly from childhood through adolescence. She is very inward-focused, tending to avoid people, but the people she does interact with fill up her life and affect it deeply.
In fact, when I think about it, NR is often dominated by others. Her mother is highly outspoken, stern, and studies constantly to become a member of the "intellectual" class, a pursuit which often matters more than the day-to-day feats of mothering. For the majority of their relationship, she dominates her daughter with unending streams of political theory, history, and polemic. Then, too, a young (and teenage, and even adult) Tracey dominates NR, telling her what to do, oppressing her with more words, forcing her to play second-banana to this outspoken, but perhaps equally insecure girl.
Then, of course, there is Aimee, whose selfishness is staggering, although not so staggering that I can't relate to her. All three of these women have moments of beauty and integrity, often coupled with the signature boldness and defiance that seem to link them all together.
And speaking of selfishness, even NR grows aware of her own privileged behavior, especially when it's held up against the impoverished African villages. (For instance, she wastes an entire liter of water flushing a cockroach down the toilet, knowing people had to walk several miles to fetch it. Later, there is also a discussion over whether the village should even be called "impoverished," when family values and community seem to be so strong ... there is more than one kind of wealth, as one character says, and constantly viewing African countries as categorically "poor" is its own form of privilege/racism.)
For the most part, though, NR's mom, Tracey, and Aimee shut out NR's needs and focus on themselves. They are casually selfish, whether it's the Jamaican immigrant mother who becomes an MP, or an aging Australian icon.
In another way, though, NR's life is very lucky. She has relationships with both parents, even if the conversations can be strained. Tracey, on the other hand, was raised by a single mother; her dad is a deadbeat criminal who avoids any but the most casual relationship. NR is also fortunate enough to attend college, where she doesn't do much except smoke weed and break up with an another oppressive figure, a young black man obsessed with numerology. Then she gets a cushy job at a TV station (this section is somehow exciting even though she does nothing) and eventually her position with Aimee, which involves both drudgery and luxury: she must do all the grunt work to care for Aimee, but she also benefits from private flights and worldwide travel.
NR's transformation from slightly unfocused, bookish teen to stressed-out millennial international white collar worker (there's a mouthful) feels strange, because it's not too much of a transformation. She doesn't change much in terms of behavior, except for becoming more attached to her phone. She is still loath to create relationships, she still finds it hard to speak to her mother, and she is still bafflingly obsessed with her friend Tracey, who achieves minor stardom in bit dance roles before fizzling out into an Internet troll.
It is this relationship with Tracey that is meant to be the core one, the fulcrum on which everything turns, but why? All because of a random moment in which a childhood friendship sparked? Because they were both half-white and half-black and lived close to each other and both wanted to dance (although only Tracey was good)? Maybe that's enough reason. After all, our earliest friendships start by the chance of convenience (neighbors, or a shared class), and they can embed themselves in our brains forever by the mere fact of occurring when we're young and still in development.
The meaning of the Tracey relationship is puzzling, and yet, as I've said, also comforting. Zadie is a humble master of adding detail and fleshing out characters' lives without you realizing it: before I knew it, several hundred pages had passed, and I felt well-versed in Tracey's anxieties and dreams, her wish to be seen as posh and elite when she is young, and her intense teenage acting-out. The transformation into furious online verbal abuser isn't handled directly -- in the frequent time shifts that mark the book, an older Tracey merely reappears as an unemployed, vocal believer in government conspiracies. This time-shifting partly contributes to that "distant" feeling hanging around several characters (Tracey is saved from this by the heavy focus on her childhood, but Lamin and Hawa, who enter the book later in the game, are not so lucky).
Now, haven't I contradicted myself? Zadie fleshes characters out, but also makes them feel distant? I think this paradox is true when speaking about her people. There is a clinical side to Zadie's writing, the scholar or academic, and at times there is a lack of emotion that negatively affects the whole "fun" part of reading a book. NR spends a decent amount of time being in a kind of anemic mildly bewildered shock, not precisely emoting, more chronicling what passes before her. This does fit in with her history as someone passed-over, relegated to sidekick, but it's not always enjoyable to read. (Which brings up the debate between logical consistency and enjoyability in writing, which is for another time ... basically is it better to create a work that makes "sense," or one that does its job of entertaining?)
I feel like my essay is a poor imitation of Zadie's book, because it's taking its time, wandering, while sort of hoping deep-down it will make a point. And make no mistake, Zadie does make a point. Her ending is beautiful; it was totally expected and unexpected (paradox alert) to me, and most importantly, it took me from feeling kind of uncertain and almost irritated to feeling thrilled. Zadie is capable of this: she can lull you into a bemused state of quasi-meditation, and then shatter your little brain with a beautiful phrase, a heartfelt action from a character. Her ending made me believe in things, gave my own tepid brain hope for another day, which is worth the admission price right there.
Zadie cares, and this caring shows through in her people. The portrait she paints of NR's mother, for instance, is realistic and beautiful. An admirable woman with her own domineering faults, a leftist-literature-reading protester who can defend her daughter fiercely from school administrators, but who also passes harsh judgements about others, including NR herself. These judgements haunt NR through the book, and it is to the book's credit that they do: Mrs. Smith does an excellent job of reproducing the anxieties of the human mind, of images and memories that more or less live inside you all the time, defining the system by which you see the world, until, little by little, perhaps you can break away.
We see very little of the breaking away, at least until the final pages, but like I said: the ending was excellent. I didn't expect it to be so good, actually, and I know I'm hyping this up so people who read it may think "ah, I don't see the big deal" because Zadie never goes for over-dramatized catharsis, or a Hollywood explosion. What she does do is tweak the proceedings a bit, making the story move into uncharted territory. Zadie, to me, seems fascinated by the world, and all the strange things in it, and it is comforting (and mind-expanding) to watch her wander around with a magnifying glass and ask questions.
There's so much more to this novel, especially with regards to its treatment of race, but I'll leave you with a maybe-not-exceptionally brief coda: the title Swing Time comes from a Fred Astaire movie. As a child, NR becomes obsessed with Fred and his dance moves, even though Tracey isn't impressed by the oldtime routines. The incorporation of film, video, and music into the book is another cool (and odd) component, since there are quite a few scenes when NR is just summarizing what's happening onscreen. The idea of writing about film (ekphrasis, my favorite word!) is nothing new, but when I saw Zadie Smith in Washington, DC, I heard her say she didn't feel the need to elaborate on the context of Fred Astaire's movies or Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video because we live in a world where we can Google anything. In this way, the Internet is a weird extension of the book, since it was written with the awareness of our technological ease in looking things up.
This might seem like a throwaway stylistic choice, but it hearkens back to the old days of a common reading list, when you could drop Shakespeare quotes in public dialogue and know that many people would understand it. (To be fair, back in the day it was exclusively wealthy white guys talking to other middle-class-and-above white guys about their commonly shared learning, but you get what I'm saying.) Except here, though, is a 21st-century version, a common language that exists outside of our heads, on the Internet. We might not know the quote Zadie is talking about, but we can look it up in two seconds on our smartphones. We can watch the videos she's describing and add to our experience of the novel.
Like this!
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