Swing Time by Zadie Smith

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Zadie Smith is, as ever, magnificent. Her work embodies what I think is one of the most important jobs of the novel, which is to allow the reader to dwell for a time in a world very different from the one they’re used to.

Swing Time also does this very cool novelistic thing where a relationship (I’m thinking of the narrator and Tracey) acquires so much history and complexity that by the end of the book, even very simple interactions between the two people take on a great depth of meaning. It just can’t happen without a fairly long story coming first, which is why it’s a feature of the novel and not the short story. (I also think something like this is possible in Netflix-binge-able television series, but not in movies.)

And this is why the novel as a form is great: because in real life, many simple interactions do in fact conceal a lot of complexity and significance; but there’s no way to explain or communicate it. A novel (particularly of the Dickens-Forster-Smith lineage) can. It’s one of those ways art can let you see life more clearly.



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NW by Zadie Smith

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Zadie Smith is legendary for a reason. She reminds me that, in a way, great novels are about empathy. If all a novel does is render another person’s world accurately, so that you can feel it, that’s enough. There doesn’t need to be more than that.

But in NW there’s so much more than that.

It’s about… how love and family are about the individual’s spirit, but also represent the attempt by some great power to extend the human species through time by means of one’s body. Which is wonderful, but also terrifying. And the two loves are often in conflict, and how that passage of those two streams of purpose around and against each other can form some very difficult eddies. The two women in the book relate to these things in a way that presents a kind of essay, or adventure, or attack, on that conflict.

It’s also a murder mystery that, at the very point where a murder mystery would reveal the identity of the culprit, reveals for the first time its own identity as a murder mystery.

Mostly, though, I guess, it’s a love song to a particular place and time, and the people there. It is as English as Dickens, or the Brontes.

NW lacks the writerly pyrotechnics (some really neat tricks with POV shifts, for instance, in On Beauty, which I really admired) but I think this story is better without them. It goes to deep places and teaches real lessons; lessons that we’re lucky if we can learn from novels rather than life.



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