Book of the Week

Swing Time by Zadie Smith
Recommended by Mr Kemp

Of all the books I have read this year, Swing Time is the one so far that kept me most emphatically hooked.

Reading often tilts between being a pleasure and a duty: a book that you pick up for the sake of the latter often blooms into the former (and the former can metastasise onerously into the latter). So if you just want that pleasurable and engrossing experience, the literary blockbuster, go on Amazon right now and read this no further. But, fundamentally, the book’s just not great. It’s patchy and lazy and all over the place. Smith absolutely knows her way around a sentence, and it is a truism to assert that she is a fine writer of comic set pieces, memorable characters, and good, ‘snappy’ dialogue. But this one doesn’t work. It’s a bust for many small reasons, and they probably look like one big reason when seen from a certain distance.

In 2008, Smith wrote a now overly famous article called ‘Two Paths for the Novel’ for The New York Review of Books. In it she compares Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland to Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, criticising O’Neill’s novel as a dull embodiment of 'lyrical realism', what she sees as the accessible, Flaubertian novel of interior psychology, and praising (rightly, mind) McCarthy’s book as a new way of writing (weird, avant-garde, European, not really about psychology, but abut ideas). This is the gist of her argument. At least I think it is, because the whole article is stuck behind an inaccessible $90 paywall on the NYRB website.

People thought, with 2012’s NW, that Smith’s seeming embrace of unusual narrative technique, modernisty sentences, a quirky structure, meant that she was launching herself down McCarthy’s road. The bit of the article I have read before the paywall cuts me off suggests that McCarthy’s book is 'an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward.' I thought this was her best book, and there are around 70 pages of it, the long chapter on Keisha, which are excellently done. But as Swing Time proves, that novel was just a detour, and Smith is firmly back in the accessible, fun, entertaining, hip, clever, often clever-clever, road she has always been on. She is still very much of the Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Don Delillo school, and if Franzen’s 2015 dud Purity is anything to go by, that type of novel is (or should be) on its way out.

The most formally unusual thing Smith has done here is used the first person voice, but there is very little to distinguish this narrator’s voice from the omniscient third person of, say, On Beauty. It is not for nothing that Smith doesn’t give the narrator a name: she doesn’t really have a character.

Well, that’s not exactly fair. The narrator’s presentation of her mixed race identity, her sense of marginalisation and liminality, are well wrought and convincing. Smith writes excellently about race, and is never heavy handed or didactic in this. But that perspective isn’t sustained over this large book. There are too many plots, too many characters, and too much stuff happening. This book, as I said, is fun, but it doesn’t add up to a wholly satisfying experience.