Culture clashes and childhood chums
Zadie Smith returns to familiar territory in her latest ‘very readable’ novel, Nicholas Reid discovers.
Since her breakthrough novel White Teeth 16 years ago, Zadie Smith has shown one great strength denied. She writes clean, clear and readable prose.
She also presents much the same social perspective in all her novels. Biracial (Jamaican mother, English father), from a lower-middle-class North London background, and having the brains to win a scholarship to the University of Cambridge, Smith writes about the tensions between what the wider English culture expects and what an ethnic upbringing has taught.
Swing Time follows this pattern, but there’s a new element. Now in her early 40s, married with children, Smith has a lot to say about motherhood.
Swing Time contrasts the lives of ‘‘two brown girls’’ from North London, the unnamed first-person narrator and her schoolmate, Tracey. The narrator, a dead-ringer for Natalie in Smith’s earlier novel NW, seems another selfportrait of the author.
The narrator’s Jamaican mum wants her to be an intellectual, support socially-conscious Left-Wing causes, and get an education. Meanwhile Tracey’s mum wants her to go into showbiz and her life is filled with tutus and tap shoes. The girls feast on old musicals on TV. Classic Hollywood production numbers are frequently referenced and become a major motif.
Inevitably the two girls grow up, their paths diverge and their friendship ends – until rather cruel circumstances bring them together again.
The novel closely observes the long swing through childhood and adolescence. Smith chronicles how kids are aware of schoolyard status symbols, how they misread the nature of adult relationships and how a best friend is also potentially a worst enemy.
When Swing Time moves into the narrator’s adult career, however, the tone turns more satirical. The narrator becomes PA and gofer to Aimee, an Australian pop mega-star. Like other wealthy showbiz figures, Aimee is an egomaniac cushioned from reality by a sycophantic support team. Seeing herself as a saviour of the world, Aimee decides to provide education for girls in an unnamed West African republic.
The narrator watches all this with a properly jaundiced eye. In the process Smith takes wide swings at white liberals who imagine they can provide quick fixes to complex problems, especially in countries whose culture they hardly understand.
Swing Time has a complex and event-filled plot, but its two parts – the account of the two girls and the larger satire – sit uneasily together. Smith welds the parts together towards the end, where the influence of mothers again looms large. But it’s an odd fit.
Even so, in the readability stakes it runs well. A good read.