C’s Reviews > Swing Time > Status Update

Oh that's CRAZY

"For in my mind...---as perhaps it is for most young people---I was at the center of things, the only person in the world with true freedom...but everybody else in these scenes, all the subsidiary characters, belonged only in the compartments in which I had placed them. Fern eternally in the pink house, Lamine confined to the dusty paths of the village. What were they doing here, now, in my New York?" So accurate

"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?"