Zadie Smith weighs in on tumultuous times in essays
Wunderkinds, even those who deservedly stick around a long time, don’t seem to age normally. Zadie Smith’s presence will always carry a significant memory of the 24-year-old who published ‘‘White Teeth’’ to international acclaim. But, being subject to the spacetime continuum, Smith is in her mid40s now, and has the temperament and perspective of someone who could be (a compliment, in this case) 105.
It’s never a boom time for wisdom — almost by definition; if it were more common, it wouldn’t be valued so highly — but this is an especially arid era for it. We’re in the Age of Certainty, at least in the bellowing of its various constituents. And maybe that’s fine; maybe some times are just for fighting ideological fire with ideological fire. But ‘‘polemic’’ is too generous a word for the dominant cultural tone.
All of which makes Smith feel especially out of time. In the very brief foreword to her first book of essays, ‘‘Changing My Mind,’’ she wrote: ‘‘Ideological inconsistency is, for me, practically an article of faith.’’ That faith doesn’t seem to have wavered in the 10 years since that book was published. ‘‘Intimations,’’ her slender new collection (less than 100 pages) of ultra-timely essays (several written in the past few momentous months), showcases her trademark levelheadedness.
This cast of mind doesn’t mean that Smith avoids moral stances. In ‘‘Intimations,’’ she speaks clearly and forcefully about the murder of George Floyd and the legacy of slavery and the systemic sins revealed by COVID-19.
‘‘The virus map of the New York boroughs turns redder along precisely the same lines as it would if the relative shade of crimson counted not infection and death but income brackets and middle-school ratings,’’ she writes. ‘‘Death comes to all — but in America it has long been considered reasonable to offer the best chance of delay to the highest bidder.’’
At her most withering, on the subject of race, she writes about the many, ‘‘even in the bluest states in America,’’ who ‘‘are very happy to ‘blackout’ their social media for a day, to read allBlack books and ‘educate’ themselves about Black issues — as long as this education does not occur in the form of
women and children in war zones, and images of their torment haunted her nights.
In “Radioactive,” Marie Sklodowska (Pike) is a physicist doing research in 1890s Paris. She is a genius, and she knows it, and lets everyone else know it — something that, because she’s a woman, makes her an unpleasant eccentric in the eyes of her colleagues. Without it ever having to be said, Pike and director Marjane Satrapi communicate that Marie accepts that her scientific calling will be her entire life, that she is too singular and exacting to expect to meet a soulmate.
And then she does.
She and he don’t realize it at first. But Pierre Curie (Sam Riley) is her intellectual equal and, more to the point, he understands that she is his intellectual equal. They establish a scientific partnership, but we see, from the beginning, the basis for a personal partnership, as well.
He is as easy-going as she is fierce and as big a dreamer as she is a skeptic. Together, they’re the whole package.
Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes, the first in physics and the second in chemistry, and “Radioactive” is the story of a career. But like “A Private War,” it’s a full story, in the sense that it shows and dwells on the costs of this great career.
Basically, she and Pierre work in a dingy laboratory all day. Eventually, they discover radium and polonium and coin the term “radioactivity,” and everything’s great for a while. And then, being around radioactive substances begins to impair their health.
Really, when theaters come back, someone ought to program a double feature of “Radioactive” and “A Private War.” In the latter, Marie Colvin can’t sleep and keeps losing her teeth. In “Radioactive,” Marie Curie can’t sleep and coughs up blood. Both are gritty portraits of relentlessness and courage, of women who, with eyes wide open, followed their gifts, even into hell.
Pike’s own commitment is wonderful to witness. “Radioactive” is a good movie, a bit more imaginative than most. (At several points, the movie takes a quick leap into the future to show the various ways radioactivity has been used, for good and for ill.) But Pike makes it something to see, simply by giving it everything.
Lately, she gives everything everything. It’s come to the point that, if Rosamund Pike is in a movie, it’s at least worth a look.