Zadie Smith

I only recently got around to listening to White Teeth, and I found it both brilliant and challenging in equal measure. Smith’s mastery is unquestionable - the characters are rich and vividly drawn, with tongue-in-cheek humour providing levity amid serious explorations of race, class, and the immigrant experience. The diverse cast has no clear heroes or villains, and the ending elegantly ties together the many seemingly random threads of the story.

Where it proved more difficult for me was show more in following all those threads to the conclusion. The narrative often drifts into deep, rich tangents before returning to the two central families and their evolving lives. While these tangents are fascinating, they sometimes slowed my momentum. Unlike other audiobooks I can breeze through in a few days, this one stretched across two months. That said, I strongly suspect many readers would be far more gripped, and the prose is gorgeous and clever throughout.

Overall, White Teeth is a masterful, thought-provoking novel. While the narrative drift made it a slower listen for me personally, the depth, humour, and characterisation make it a book well worth experiencing. show less

The essays in this slim collection circle around the current pandemic, sometimes using it as a metaphor for other viral threats, sometimes catching its aftermath before there is an aftermath, and sometimes turning to face it head on. I’m not sure whether Zadie Smith could even write a poor piece of prose, and certainly not here. She is thoughtful and cautious, angry when anger is warranted (it’s often warranted), thinking through her actions and reactions, and periodically second or show more third guessing herself. She tends to straddle the Atlantic divide, drawing examples from Britain and from America, mingling them casually. But what I like best is when she is focussed on the tiny particularities of life, with love.

Of course there are some essays that I like more than others. But I think I wouldn’t want to have the whole without its many parts. Enjoy them each in their own way.

Gently recommended. show less

There is something clear-sighted and honest about Zadie Smith’s essay style. Over a spread of 31 pieces on such varied subjects as Brexit, dance, art exhibitions, book reviews, and what might be called think-pieces, Smith is consistently insightful, self-deprecating, erudite, and personal. She eschews the fashion amongst (especially British) essayists of disingenuousness. It’s clear that she must have been a precociously literate child, an intense reader of works well above her age show more bracket, and an early writer (well, obviously, since her first novel was published to great acclaim when she was still in university). When she turns her attention to matters literary or artistic she is able to offer opinions based on both breadth of experience and depth of understanding. And though she is not touted as a philosophical writer, her essays on philosophical topics (e.g. juxtaposing Justin Bieber with Martin Buber) are refreshing and provocative. Yet some of the essays I like best are those in which she mentions what it was like growing up in London with her Jamaican-born mother and her elderly, white, father, both of whom she so clearly loves (and who dearly loved her), even though the marriage itself broke down when she was just a young girl.

I would gladly read almost anything coming from Zadie Smith. This collection reinforces that intention. Enjoy it in full and wait impatiently, as I will, for what Smith writes next. show less

I finished The Fraud by Zadie Smith last night. It is based on a true legal case that caught the public imagination in Victorian England. Roger Tichborne, supposedly lost in a shipwreck, suddenly turns up to claim his aristocratic inheritance . . . but is he who he says he is, or is he Arthur Orton, a butcher from Australia? The trial to determine if he is the heir or an impostor excited the public and divided people into factions.

The novel is told mainly from the point of view of Mrs. Eliza show more Touchet, a childless widow now employed as a housekeeper by her cousin, William Ainsworth, a novelist whose star is fading as fast as that of his friend, Charles Dickens, is rising. Mrs. Touchet has been rather in love with William, and more decidedly in love with his wife. But after the couple’s estrangement and Frances’s death, William has taken a new wife, his former cook. Although Mrs. Touchet dislikes Sarah and finds her common, the two of them share an interest in the Tichborne case and bond by attending the courtroom hearings together.

What fascinates Mrs. Touchet more than the claimant is his primary witness, Andrew Bogle, who served Sir Roger’s late uncle as a slave on his Jamaican sugar plantation. She finds him dignified and intelligent, and her conversations with him spark her interest in abolition and cause her to reevaluate her beliefs about race, class, history, social norms, and English exceptionalism. In short, she begins to see the many forms of hypocrisy that surround her.

I took my time reading this one, and after I finished it, I read many reviews on Amazon that recommended that this is the way to go. It’s the kind of book that has you backtracking and, at the end, wanting to read it again to catch what you may have missed. I’ve been a Zadie Smith fan ever since White Teeth. She is always true to her Willesden roots but has been increasingly daring in writing about the neighborhood in which she grew up in imaginative frameworks. The Fraud won’t be for everyone, but I enjoyed it immensely. show less