Swing Time puzzle-packed
British author Zadie Smith’s fifth book addresses race thoughtfully
At just 41, Zadie Smith has published her fifth novel, proving once again how masterful she is at creating characters carrying around a multitude of identities, who you don’t always like, but understand.
The award-winning British novelist and essayist who found explosive success at 24 with her first book, “White Teeth,” described her last novel, NW, as “a little puzzle that you solve yourself.” In her latest offering, “Swing Time,” there is no shortage of big puzzles: poverty, toxic friendship, strained mother-daughter relations and seeking out a tribe.
The story is told in first-person by an unnamed girl growing up in public housing with her activist Jamaican mother and English working-class father in northwest London.
While she hopes to become a professional dancer, her closest childhood friend Tracey, who is also biracial, achieves the feat.
But luck lands the narrator her own brush with celebrity, as a personal assistant to an Aussie pop star, Aimee.
Despite her volatile relationship with Tracey, she continues to watch the dancer’s career with both envy and hope — she sees Tracey as a sister, the only other person really part of her tribe.
Her mother’s Jamaica remains an unknown, and “going back” to an unnamed West African country as part of a pet project her celebrity boss, Aimee, takes on doesn’t fill her with the sense of belonging she thought it might — she’s interpreted as a white woman there.
But it’s a different story in London and New York, where she spends her time looking after Aimee’s every whim and need.
When Aimee’s manager urges the star to include a woman of colour in yet another pet project, the narrator considers how she has fulfilled that role:
“I had the eerie sensation of being viewed a sort of object … a kind of conceptual veil, a moral fig-leaf, protecting such-and-such person from such-and-such critique.”
“Swing Time” has a different approach to race than “White Teeth” — she doesn’t meticulously document London’s diversity, instead she invites readers into her mind. Her commentary on race is sharp because it’s simply observational, such as when the narrator is watching a performance of Showboat and notes the lead is a white woman, that “even a tragic mulatto apparently wasn’t quite fit to play a tragic mulatto.”
But she isn’t moved to do anything about it the way her intellectual, activist-turned-politician mother is. As in most spheres of her world, she lets life happen to her, in direct contrast with Tracey, who takes what she thinks is rightfully hers, and Aimee, who assumes everything is for her.
As a reader, this was the most disappointing part of the book — despite her obsession with the carefully choreographed steps of Fred Astaire and Ginger Roberts, the narrator appears to just float, unattached to anything through time.
But Smith makes up for this with her tendency to casually sprinkle wisdom throughout the book about subjects, such as the economics of divorce, the petty nature of intellectuals and the ugly machinations required to fuel celebrity.
There is also a joy in getting to know the cast; Smith creates the kind of characters you’ve met in real life but haven’t read about before — the mother who is more interested in her own education than her daughter’s dance classes, the progressive college boyfriend you’re not politically radical enough to satisfy, the childhood friend whose judgment you can’t escape.
The plot itself isn’t what will keep you thinking about the book — it’s the puzzles Smith has laid out that readers will keep returning to.