Zadie Smith

Brilliant. With Smith's other novels I have appreciated them more than I liked them; they felt too academic. In Swing Time, she nails a perfect blend of character, story, and issues: identity, race, feminism, inequality. The unnamed narrator ("I experienced myself as a kind of shadow") grows up with a close friend/rival in Tracey, who devotes her life to dance; the narrator, who lacks the physical talent (and whose mother has academic ambitions for her), instead goes to regular school and show more college and becomes a personal assistant to pop star Aimee. Aimee gets it in her head to build a school for girls in a West African country, and the narrator is thrust between the reality on the ground and the one in Aimee's head. A bit naive, politically uninformed, and unambitious, the narrator is nevertheless sympathetic. A solid novel.

Quotes

A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow. (4)

And what are babies, I can remember thinking, if they can do this to women? Do they have the power to reprogram their mothers? To make their mothers into the kinds of women their younger selves would not even recognize? (110)

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 I give Tracey? What did Tracey give me? (122)

...Aimee herself had no abstract interest in power. She was motivated by something else: impatience. To Aimee poverty was one of the world's sloppy errors, one among many, which might be easily corrected if only people would bring to the problem the focus she brought to everything. (127)

I knew it was childish but I was in an absolute rage about my birthday...I was feeding off it in that righteous way you can if you never mention out loud the wrong you are being done. (136)

...her life was perfect as far as I was concerned, and this is one side-effect of envy, maybe, this failure of imagination. (215)

Watching all that fire with so little kindling, it was of course easy to despair. (225)

"No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless."
"I don't see anything ingenious about poverty like this. I don't see anything ingenious about having ten children when you can't afford one."
Fern put his glasses back on and smiled at me sadly.
"Children can be a kind of wealth," he said. (Fern and narrator, 253)

I did try to be happy for her. I knew it was what she'd always wanted. But it's hard, when you're at a loose end yourself, to be happy for others... (307-308)

I hugged her but felt the familiar smile fasten itself on my face...and I experienced the same acute sense of betrayal. I was ashamed to feel that way but couldn't help it, a piece of my heart closed against her. (377)

But I could see she wanted to talk, that her pat phrases were like lids dancing on top of bubbling cooking pots, and all I had to do was sit patiently and wait for her to boil over. (378)

"Men are so ridiculous. But it turns out so are women." (narrator's mother, 392)

To avoid watching her, I looked around the circle at all the adamant, inflexible love, sadly misdirected....[Hawa's] perfect face wrapped up tightly like a present. (416)

...devoting all time and energy to somebody else's existence, to somebody else's desires and needs and requirements. It's a shadow life and after a while it gets to you. Nannies, assistants, agents, secretaries, mothers - women are used to it. Men have a lower tolerance. (431)

When I was a child [my mother] had been immortal. I couldn't imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric. (443)

The power she has over me is the same as it has always been, judgment, and it goes beyond words. (447-448) show less

Swing Time is the story of two brown girls -- our unnamed narrator, and her childhood friend Tracey, who she meets in dance class. Both girls are mixed -- the narrator's mother is Jamaican, educated, and focused more on improving herself and the world around her than her daughter while her father is kind but useless, while Tracey's Black father has been gone for ages and her white mother spoils her. Tracey has real dance talent, and pursues it long after the narrator gives it up. The show more narrator eventually loses sight of Tracey as she goes on to college and eventually becomes a personal assistant to Aimee, a pop star who decides to start a school in West Africa. The narrator ends up travelling to Africa to help with the development of the school and there begins to confront some truths about herself, her life, and her relationship with Tracey.

I enjoyed this overall, but it felt like it lacked focus somewhat; the time jumps back and forth between childhood and the narrator's adult life as a PA and in Africa and I found that somewhat disruptive. I also found the narrator to be the least compelling part of the book, so it was sometimes hard to read the whole thing through her eyes. 3.5 stars. show less

"I remember there was always a girl with a secret, with something furtive and broken in her, and walking through the village with Aimee, entering people's homes, shaking their hands, accepting their food and drink, being hugged by their children, I often thought I saw her again, this girl who lives everywhere and at all times in history, who is sweeping the yard or pouring out tea or carrying someone else's baby on her hip, and looking over at you with a secret she can't tell..."
I am a fan show more of Smith. A much savvier reading friend put me on to her through [On Beauty], the story of two families mixed histories. I wish she still wrote for the Guardian Reviews about other people's books. I thought the only problem with The Embassy of Cambodia was it was too short, and NW struck all sorts of memories about living in London. So that is a really longwinded way of saying that I was really pleased to get a Netgalley for this book.

Told exclusively from the perspective of one young woman, child of a white working class guy and a woman from Jamaica who is so determined to pull herself up she has all but forgotten her daughter is there too. [Swing Time] is a reference to the musicals which she watches with her friend Tracey, a gifted dancer. Those dances, the films, and their music, recur throughout the book as the narrator reflects on her family and 'race'. Tracey's dad left long ago, and her mum is not working, 'on benefits', with a 'Kilburn facelift'. Smith catches the differences between a certain kind of aspirational family and a kind of working class one: including the firm belief from parents that children can be somehow convinced that not having a particular doll is a *good* thing (fail).

The story leaps between the narrator's childhood and her employment as a PA to an Australian singer-actress: long famous, young despite her years, fiercely fit and capable of dropping people without looking back. The singer, Aimee, decides to fund a school in Senegal. Our narrator is the pathfinder, exploring the options for supporting a girls' school, spending long periods in the Senegalese village to make plans with a more experienced development worker. And here her job gets horribly complicated. Smith nods to the freight of a British -Jamaican in West Africa: she visits the slave castles, tries to imagine herself back in time. But in the village she is given oven chips instead of sharing the family rice, not permitted to work or help, and treated firmly as an outsider. It was here that I most loved this book. Smith puts her finger on so many development gremlins: subtly and smartly, not offering glib solutions just raising things to the light and saying 'this is really odd: what is going on here?' The bit at the end might sound far fetched but for the news of celebs and their 'African adventures'. Smith lets no one off lightly. show less

Part of the genius of this book is that the title could apply to almost any character in it: the main character, Mrs. Eliza Touchet, cousin by marriage to the author William Ainsworth; Ainsworth himself (based on a real author, a contemporary of Dickens, who also makes appearances in the novel); Charles Dickens; and of course one of the central figures of the novel, Sir Roger Tichborne - back from the dead, with amnesia, or a butcher from Wapping? Set in and around London in the 1800s, The show more Fraud wrestles with many questions, but freedom and slavery are central, with Black Jamaican Andrew Bogle's tale providing a central section of the novel. Through the Ainsworth household and William's literary circle, we see how white Brits viewed the issue of the slave trade and their complicity in it, and how men were central to society and women nearly powerless and peripheral, no matter how sharply observant they are.

Quotes

The strange thing about good people, Eliza had noticed, was the manner in which they saw that same quality everywhere and in everyone, when in truth it is vanishingly rare. (31)

How could it be that everything he had ever written was nonsense - with the exception of what he wrote about her? (39)

"Or: he's a fraud....In the case of a mystery, the simplest solution will tend to be the right one." (52)

Her cousin was never a man much given to grudges, finding them hard to maintain. The truth was he dreaded conflict: he only really knew how to be wounded. (60)

William was lecturing, his preferred mode. Unlike so many other men Eliza had known, however, this habit in William spring not out of a need to dominate but from a sincere overflow of enthusiasm. (73)

The other life she might have lived, had only every single thing been different. (75)

Over the years she had concluded that there was no point in becoming furious at sheer ignorance... (82)

In the silence, Eliza was pricked, on the sudden, by an overwhelming and acute sense of loneliness. A severe, revisionist feeling, it worked upon her cruelly, making her feel that loneliness was all she had ever known. (90)

What can we know of other people? How much of the mystery of another person could one's own perspicacity divine? (144)

The line between courtroom and theatre was far thinner than she would have supposed. (174)

Eliza attributed this not to any special skill on her cousin's part but to the fact that the great majority of people turn out to be extraordinarily suggestible, with brains like sieves through which the truth falls. (209)

And in the absence of an audience, she realized, nothing really offended her, except cruelty. (222)

Who was this well-fed fraud, with a home and a hearth, and a small mirror above that hearth, and two brown boys, and his own evening paper in his lap? (Bogle, 315)

But such dry and inconvenient facts were of no consequence here, in this ocean of feeling. (342)

'We shook on it, sir! And that is usually contract enough for any honourable man! Unless he is some kind of a FRAUD?' (Cruikshank to Ainsworth, 383)

...people lie to themselves. People like to themselves all the time. (389)

She wished that life's pages could be flicked forward as in a novel, to see if what followed was worth attending to in the present. (389)

Sometimes we don't want to be chivvied out of our sadness or bitterness or anger. Sometimes all we want is consolation. (400)

'Is he making fun of me, Lizzie? AM I a fraud?' (Ainsworth to Mrs. Touchet, 402)

'I tell you that those who suffer cannot wait.' (Henry Bogle to Eliza, 444) show less