Explorations of uncertainty
A collection of Zadie Smith’s essays gets better as it goes on.
In the foreword to this collection of essays, Zadie Smith explains her anxiety about the form. “It’s true that for years I’ve been wondering if I’ve made myself ludicrous. Essays about one person’s affective experience have, by their very nature, not a leg to stand on. All they have is their freedom.” That includes the freedom to be of wildly varying quality.
Smith’s insecurity pulses throughout the book. A lot of the essays in Feel Free are works of criticism: of books, films and artworks. Some are talks Smith has given, often while receiving awards for her writing. Some are personal essays reflecting on the writer's life as a woman who grew up poor in North London with a black mother and a white father and is now a successful middle-class writer, teaching a prestigious master of fine arts course in the US, and what that transition means. As with Smith’s novels, themes of immigration, racism, multiculturalism and feminism abound.
The essays I liked the most – and at her best, Smith is truly excellent – were the ones in which she addresses a central uncertainty that is worrying her.
In “The I Who Is Not Me”, Smith considers why she avoided writing fiction in the first person until her latest novel, Swing Time, whose protagonist’s life in some ways resembles Smith’s own.
“It became important for me to believe my fiction was about other people, rather than myself,” she writes. “I took a strange pride in this idea, as if it proved I was less self-preoccupied or vain than the memoir-
As with Smith’s novels, themes of immigration, racism, multiculturalism and feminism abound.
ist or the blogger or the Bildungsroman- er. No one could accuse me of hubris if I wasn’t there.”
The essays I liked least were the ones in which Smith seems to be trying to cover up her insecurity with intellectualism. From an exhibition review: “For us, the image-map that has been made of
the world is not exactly the same as the territory itself, or rather, we can still remember – if only vaguely – a moment in time when the seams were still partially visible.”
The essays in Feel Free get much better as the book progresses, so I recommend starting at the back. The book feels more like a compilation of all the non-fiction Smith has written over the past few years, rather than a curated collection of her best essays. But the best bits are worth reading in order to spend time with Smith when she’s being vulnerable and honest.