All things considered
Zadie Smith may be one of those writers who work best in the essay form. Sure, mine’s a minority opinion. But I’m struck how — relieved of the exertion (and stakes) of persuasive invention — certain writers lift off; a different spaciousness seems to aerate and buoy their prose. Readers can feel the author’s delight in that sudden lightness and freedom, a zestful doubling-down.
Smith’s aptly titled new collection, “Feel Free,” embodies this delight, featuring a smorgasbord of pieces that first appeared in the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Harper’s and similar high-end journals: book, film and music reviews; examinations of art, modern culture ( Jay-Z, Facebook), other writers, politics and personal musings.
What binds the collection is Smith’s voice: frank, urgent, self-ironic. Dipping into these pieces (in any order) is like setting out on a walk with a vibrant, curious, gracefully articulate friend.
Indeed, Smith’s eager to meet the tougher realities head-on. In her foreword (written in January 2017), she warns: “These essays ... written in England and America during the eight years of the Obama presidency ... are the product of a bygone world. But ... you can’t fight for a freedom you’ve forgotten how to identify.” Ever alert to those truths that preempt others, Smith pronounces Brexit a “total disaster” when meeting with fellow New York University teachers to commence a Paris semester. But she instantly accedes to Bosnian-born author Aleksander Hemon’s quiet correction — that Brexit is in fact “just a disaster,” whereas “War is the total disaster.” Hemon had lived through it. A reader’s awareness is sharpened, alongside Smith’s.
In pieces (wisely) placed up front, like “Fences: a Brexit Diary” and “Optimism and Despair,” Smith (child of a white English father and a Jamaican mother) confronts inevitable paradoxes: “I find these days that a wistful form of time travel has become a persistent political theme ... nearly seven in ten Republicans prefer America as it was in the fifties, a nostalgia ... entirely unavailable to a person like me, for in that period I could not vote, marry my husband, have my children, work in the university I work in, or live in my neighborhood.”
What’s more: “The day after the [Brexit] vote, a lady shopping for linens and towels ... stood near my mother and the half-dozen other people originally from other places and announced to no one in particular: ‘Well, you’ll all have to go home now!’ ”
Smith is undefeated: “I am by nature not a political person and these are the darkest political times I have ever known ... [But if ] novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioural possibilities.”
Because Smith was reared in England but lives part time in New York, we benefit from her two-way cultural vision; place (ergo, sensibility) is always on her mind, and the results are bracing. In “Find Your Beach” (one of my favorites), Smith stands at the window of her Manhattan tower block apartment (careful to remind us that it’s university housing) at 4 a.m.: “holding a newborn in my arms” — and spots “another mother, in the tower opposite, holding her baby . ... We stood there at our respective windows, separated by a hundred feet of expensive New York air ... I was the ad for what she already had.”
Born in 1975, Smith remembers doing ecstasy at a rave. In present tense, she rears children, loses a parent, worries about aging — mindful of her comparative privilege; savoring compensations. In her terrific closing essay, “Joy”: “I seem to get more than the ordinary satisfaction out of food ... An egg sandwich from one of these grimy food vans on Washington Square has the genuine power to turn my day around . ... Even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle.”
Organized into five umbrella categories — “In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, Feel Free” — Smith’s subject-span offers the proverbial something for nearly everyone. A handful of photographs, reproduced a bit blurrily (Sebald-like, as if fetched from a dream), prompt some of her reflections (wandering the Uffizi with her father, channeling Billie Holiday, considering corpses in life and art): images that readers will leaf back to study.
Unsurprisingly, a collection this size suggests that a few of its constructs may droop (“Meet Justin Bieber!”). It was Smith’s thinking about writers that most compelled me, Paula Fox and Geoff Dyer among them: “[Fox] means to track misery ... as it encroaches on happiness...” And: “Dyer seems always to be questing to comprehend somebody else’s quest.”
But her more intimate mullings (family and relationships; time, destiny) ring equally powerful. On grief: “The writer Julian Barnes ... once said, ‘It hurts just as much as it is worth.’ What an arrangement. Why would anyone accept such a crazy deal?” This kind of companionability makes “Feel Free’s” parts — if occasionally uneven — form a pleasurable whole. Its subtitle could well be “dispatches from a life in progress.”
Joan Frank’s latest novel is “All the News I Need,” winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction. Email: books@sfchronicle.com