C’s Reviews > Swing Time > Status Update

"She did not struggle, as I did---as most women I knew did---to find ways to dress her body in the symbols, shapes, and signs of the age."

I love this wembledon/pizza place/race war scene so much. It reminds me of what I admire most about Zadie Smith's writing on a micro level. She engages with racial and ethnic identity and dynamics and tensions and relationships with such blunt humor and candidness and fearlessness, in a way I have yet to find in any other writer.

"I should have been the closest thing he had to an ally, but every conversation we attempted went awry somehow, the way he understood the world was so genuinely alien to me that it felt as if he occupied a parallel reality, which I didn't doubt was the real one"

"He gives her class, she gives him sex. Was this a general rule? Did all friendships---all relations---involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power? Did it extend to peoples and nations or was it a thing that happened only between individuals? What did my father give my mother---and vice versa?"

“Even I, who had been to her house only once before, managed to feel more possessive about Lily’s things than Lily herself.” LOL too real

“The white girls—who had generally been included in the playground mania—were now mysteriously no longer included: it was as if they had never been involved in the first place.” This is so painfully accursed and astute—like the vibe shift that lets u know it’s going to get dark