Zadie Smith is the great contemporary chronicler of the nature of personal identity. She first visited this subject in her brilliant and exuberant debut novel, White Teeth (2000), and since then she has produced a body of work that is distinguished by its careful, forgiving and unsettlingly insightful considerations of what it means to be a person in a particular time and place.
She is compulsively and rewardingly dialectical, always determined to see a question from both sides, perennially aware of the great novelistic imperative to explore the worlds that lie beyond our most cherished assumptions. Thomas Mann said that the art of fiction is the art of “not quite”; for Zadie Smith, one feels, it might also be the art of “what if?”
In her latest novel, Swing Time, Smith addresses these subjects by way of the recollections of an unnamed narrator who, when the book opens, has recently lost her job as personal assistant to an Australian pop star. After spending a few days sequestered in "humiliation" in a temporary rented flat in St John's Wood, London, she steps out aimlessly into the city. Her journey takes her to Embankment, where she crosses the bridge that straddles the city's great river, and thinks "as I often think as I cross that bridge – of two young men, students, who were walking over it very late one night when they were mugged and thrown over the railing, into the Thames. One lived and one died. I've never understood how the survivor managed it, in the darkness, in the absolute cold, with the terrible shock and his shoes on".
It's characteristic of Smith to direct us to the suffering of the survivor, to note the haunting detail of his shoes. Later, the narrator finds herself watching a clip from Swing Time ("A film I know very well, I watched it over and over as a child"); she plays it to her boyfriend on her laptop. They are both disturbed by Fred Astaire appearing in black face: "I'd managed to block the childhood image from my memory: the rolling eyes, the white gloves, the Bojangles grin. I felt very stupid."
These themes of race and identity recur, as the narrator reflects on the nature and development of her childhood friendship with Tracey, with whom she grew up on the same North London estate in the 1970s and 1980s. Both were obsessed with dancing, yet only Tracey had a talent for it. Both are of mixed race: the narrator has a black mother (formidable, driven, determined to become an MP) and a white father (kindly and unambitious), Tracey a white mother and a black father whom she seldom sees, and who she claims works as a backing dancer for Michael Jackson.
As the story of their relationship unfurls, we see the bond between the two girls – and, later, women – gather in complexity and intensity, even as they are enduring long periods of silence and separation. The bond is established early on when, one fireworks night, Tracey’s father arrives at her home and assaults her mother; and when, not long afterwards, the narrator is introduced to her father’s white children from a previous marriage. In the aftermath of these occurrences, the two silently resolve to treat one another, and the delicate and necessary fictions they allow themselves, with extreme care. “Neither of us pressed too hard,” recalls the narrator, “and a delicate equilibrium was allowed to persist.”
One of the great interests of the novel lies in seeing how this equilibrium is affected by the passing of time (the word time and its cognates appear throughout the book with striking frequency), by the chance distribution of talents, and by the lives the two women find themselves leading. Tracey works as a jobbing dancer, causes a terrible disruption in the narrator’s relationship with her father, becomes a single mother. The narrator is childless, travels the world and participates in an initiative to alleviate poverty in Africa.
The novel that results from these elements is tender, challenging, funny, arresting, and full of intelligence and empathy. Smith writes evocatively of British life in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and penetratingly about the fraught nature, the fragile beauty, of human relationships, human desires, human fears. And her prose, which is identifiably her own but rich and enriched with the rhythms and cadences of Saul Bellow, George Eliot, Charles Dickens (especially Dickens), is almost always beautiful: vivid, fresh, particular and, like the book that it does so much to create, full of time, life and swing.
Matthew Adams is a regular contributor to The Review.
