If you measured a writer’s ambition by the scale of her self-deprecation, few would rank as high as Zadie Smith. Ever since White Teeth (2000), the debut that made her one of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation at age 24, she’s been expressing disappointment with her own limitations: She had wanted to write “like Kafka,” she lamented a year after the novel was published, but sounded more “like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault.” Her prolific, exuberant comedy—which James Wood had skewered as “hysterical realism”—already seemed out of step with the times. A month after September 11, Smith found herself sitting in her underpants, “looking at a blank screen, finding nothing funny . . . smoking a family-sized pouch of Golden Virginia.” It’s a charming portrait of the artist as a sweating, neurotic mess.



SWING TIME by Zadie Smith Penguin Press, 464 pp., $27.00

The question of sweat, of the effort of self-invention, has always been at the center of Smith’s writing. Each of her books since White Teeth—a sprawling social novel that celebrated multicultural Britain—has marked what she learned from her preceding work: the satirical family saga of On Beauty in 2005; the quasi-modernist experiment of NW in 2012. What’s more, she is drawn to the workings of things that are constructed, that are in some sense not real and yet have real, intractable effects: class, race, gender, money, beauty, fame. Reading her, you see the work it takes for people to hoist themselves from one social context into another, and the code-switching that such a process both enables and requires. You see how hard it is to distinguish between internal limits and external ones, and thus how hard it is to untangle what sort of effort a person can or should make to win the rigged game they’ve been born into.

Such questions have only become more vexed since Smith started writing; the beginning of her career coincided with the tail end of a period of increased social mobility in Britain. She got to university, she told The White Review last year, just before all the “safety nets and ladders”—notably free tuition—got pulled up for good. NW, which traces the socioeconomic fortunes of two working-class friends, was, she said, “an expression of my own heartbreak” for the passing of that promise.

While her latest novel, Swing Time, is superficially smoother and more conventional than NW, it makes a remarkable leap in technique. Smith has become increasingly adept at combining social comedy and more existential concerns—manners and morals—through the flexibility of her voice, layering irony on feeling and vice versa. In a culture that often reduces identity politics to a kind of personal branding, Smith works the same questions into a far deeper (and more truly political) consideration of what it takes to form a self. The nameless mixed-race narrator of Swing Time doesn’t bother to be offended when, in her professional life, she’s treated as a token, a “conceptual veil” or “moral fig-leaf”—she’s keen to observe and interpret the experience, which she feels is “like being fictional.”

The two main characters in Swing Time—our narrator and her friend Tracey—have a lot in common with Smith herself: Born in the mid-1970s, they grow up in northwest London at the same time she did. Each has one white and one nonwhite parent, and each hopes to become a performer, studying filmed dance routines for hours. They share, too, a preoccupation with effort. We observe them trying to puzzle out the relationship between talent and hard work, between how much is required and how much their exertions should stay hidden.