Why Zadie Smith is a rock star among writers
The first time I laid eyes on Zadie Smith, it was eerily perfect.
Puttering around Venice one year for the Biennale, where all arty party paths collide at night’s end on the terrace of the Bauer Hotel, I spotted the scribe. It could be no other. The turban announced her.
Gondolas banged in the darkness. Across the way, the chalky dome of Santa Maria della Salute beckoned. Various species of the jet set — smoking Russians, flirting Brazilians — made hay, yet Smith, then the prodigal author of the million-copies-sold White Teeth, remained my sole object of obsession.
An experienced celebrity-huntsman, it didn’t even occur to me to approach her: One knows better than to let a flesh-and-blood meeting ruin a Grade-A apparition.
“No other British writer of Smith’s generation (or since) has had her early, extreme fame,” noted one critic not long ago, and it’s true that in the near-decade since that encounter, Smith’s place in the firma- ment has only solidified. This was made more than amply clear when the generational messiah — this side of 40 — breezed into the Appel Salon at the Toronto Reference Library last week to promote her newest novel, Swing Time.
With 600 people gathered in the room, another 200 jousting for space in an anteroom and many more, no doubt, following on a live stream, it’s clear there has been no ebb in the flow. Can you say “rock star?”
“Oh my God, my brain. I’m so tired,” she sighed at one point, while speaking with book expert Eleanor Wachtel and hitting a wall with a particular point she was making. It was a human-level moment that perhaps only elevated her goddess-ness.
As a whole, the appearance in Toronto seemed to amplify the idea of Zadie Smith’s Zadie-ness, her having hit the millennium all those years ago as what the Financial Times dubbed “the perfect Y2 package.” Clever, well-spoken, the product of humble beginnings but elite degrees from Cambridge and Harvard, multiracial and gorgeous.
Most astonishingly perhaps — all these books later — any knives that sharpened never stuck and there is a Michelle Obama-like scale of goodwill toward her, as exemplified by the social media glee that erupted last month when Smith was Instagram-videoed channelling Billie Holiday at a party in the Bemelmans Bar in New York’s Carlyle Hotel. She was belting “Easy Living;” it was hauntingly good. (What can’t she do?)
Moreover, it proved yet again that, however good her writing is — the novels since White Teeth haven’t always persuaded me, to be honest — Zadie Smith’s best invention is Zadie Smith.
What the author is definitely good at? Giving an interview. In her Appel Salon manifestation, I was struck by the musicality of her voice . . . a sleepy, conspiratorial drawl. Unlike most authors, often the very worst oral ambassadors for their books, she really draws you in. Confession: I haven’t read Swing Time, but I’ve listened to every interview and bloody podcast about it that she’s done of late. (Do check out her NPR stop with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.)
In a world where writers are not only writers, but also stage performers and travelling salespeople, Smith’s breadth proves ever alluring.
She can hold forth on the trickery of time or the slipperiness of the notion of the “self-made man,” as she did in Toronto.
But this is also the woman whose sideline in non-fiction has led her to interviewing Jay Z for the New York Times (“it was like talking to Chaucer,” she later said) and doing a Jane Goodall-like jaunt to Oscar weekend. (The essay, found in her collection Changing My Mind, is one of the best things ever written about the Oscars.)
In Toronto, she was most quenching when she talked about female friendships (the main theme of Swing Time). Not willing to bend to the cartoon colourings of frenemyship, she also doesn’t buy the idea of “BFFs” or the way “we’re encouraged to infantilize our friendships at the moment.”
Like that elder-priestess Joan Didion, who was famously immortalized in a Céline ad last year, Smith never fails to make an impression.
Decked out this eve in a tuxedo jacket, skinny not-quite leggings and requisite headcloth (dusty rosehued), she was, as Vogue recently headlined, “a serious style icon — even if she won’t admit it.”
Ah, yes, her turban game. The secrets they could tell. Notably, at a wedding they were both at some years back, Smith taught Gen X touchstone Molly Ringwald how to tie a turban. “Now,” Ringwald added via tweet, “if she could also give me her cheekbones.”
The pith of Smith’s fame? Best surmised by Smith herself when speaking with London’s Evening Standard. Alluding to her exile in Manhattan — where she lives with her poet husband and their two kids — she noted drily of her ubiquity in the U.K., “My fame seems not to require my presence.”