Swing Time

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 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, show more 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 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 show more 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 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 show more 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

I listened to the audio, so brilliantly read by Pippa Bennett-Warner that I looked her up. Turns out she's also in my favorite binge-watching series, Harlots. So it seems I am officially a fan! She had to deliver quite a few accents, and I think her only misstep was making all the Americans sound alike. But I think only an American would notice that. This was a big, baggy book, overflowing with incidents and characters, giving a many angled take on race and privilege in London, New York and West Africa. At first I expected the book to be the story of two mixed race, working class London girls, following them from childhood into their thirties, but one girl's life completely swamped the other and took the book in a very different show more direction, as she became a personal assistant to a Madonna-like superstar. I suppose this was inevitable, since the story is told in the first person by this character - who I just realized is never named! It feels to me like there is too much in Swing Time for one novel - I'd have liked to see it split in two, with each book written in the first person by one of the girls. This wouldn't cut anything out of the first book, but would give us a deeper look into Tracey. show less

I was completely captivated by the story while also completely disliking the protagonist/narrator. Her cluelessness about anything happening around her, her passivity, her inability to ever say the right thing at the right time, all of these qualities were utterly infuriating to me. (This is one of those times where what I hate most in others is what I hate most in myself.) Every time I put the book down it was with some level of exasperation with the narrator; yet I couldn't stop picking the book up. The story loops and circles, which I always love. And the other characters have something going on, something worth diving into feet first. Highly recommend.

Zadie Smith's new novel is about two girls who meet in a dance class. They're the only two brown girls in the class, but they become friends because of their shared love of dance and those old movies starring Fred Astaire. Tracey has talent, and eventually their paths diverge, as our narrator gives up dance and moves on to university, then a job at a television studio and then as an assistant to a famous singer (a little too obviously modeled on Madonna). But their paths will eventually cross again.

Swing Time feels like two novels mashed together. The parts set during the narrator's childhood are fantastic. They feel true and they make for fascinating reading as both girls grow up. They are both interracial girls living in housing show more estates who share a common interest, but there the similarities stop. The narrator's mother is driven to better herself, to get a degree and to change the world and her father is loving and present. Tracey is being raised by a single mother who is harshly judged by the neighbors for first being lazy and then, after she finds a job, for leaving her daughter alone too much. But Tracey's house is freer and her mother more present in her life than the narrator's.

The other part of the book concerns a famous rock star who is interested in Africa and who sends the narrator there to keep an eye on the school she founds. The narrator's experiences in the unnamed African country don't quite reach the level of Westerner-touched-by-the-simple-lives-of-the-natives, but it's not comfortable reading. And the parts involving the Madonna-like Aimee were interesting, but fell short of the other part of the book.

Still, this is an interesting book by a gifted writer and worth the time spent with it. show less

Ugh, not the best start to my New Year's resolution of reading more in 2017! I would have to concur with the other three star reviews here - Zadie Smith is a brilliant wordsmith, but when readers are left thinking, 'Wow, that was really well written!' over 'What a great story with relatable characters!', something has obviously come unstuck. I loved the chapters in 1980s London, which were the most convincing, but 'Aimee' (a Madonna style popstar) and the section in Africa didn't move me at all. Also, I was barely conscious by the end, but that only stirred a passing 'Huh?' from me. The pacing was completely off, too - why the constant back and forth if nothing really came of Tracey's story? A disappointment, but I shall not be defeated.