That slip into the present tense is telling. The narrator was in thrall to Tracey from the moment she laid eyes on her; years later, she’s in thrall to her still. She doesn’t care that Tracey lacks “soul.” It’s enough that she has total command over her body, the exquisite look of artistry without its animating spirit.

Tracey knows how to exploit this kind of devotion. She has a gift for cruelty, the authority that comes with spotting others’ weaknesses. “Look at her,” she tells the narrator, as they watch a video of Astaire, in “Top Hat,” twirling Ginger Rogers to “Cheek to Cheek.” “She looks fucking scared.” In one discomfiting chapter, the girls are invited to the birthday party of a white, middle-class schoolmate, Lily Bingham. They are the only black kids there, and as soon as Tracey realizes that Lily’s mother won’t smack her for misbehaving she seizes power, stealing candy and kicking seats on a trip to the movies. Later, she raids Mrs. Bingham’s underwear drawer for lingerie to wear in a lewd dance routine in which she enlists her friend. The narrator is sure that her own mother will punish them when she picks them up; instead, she defends Tracey’s behavior to Mrs. Bingham as an impressionable child’s imitation of her parents’ bad influence.

This turns out to be an excuse to save face. Her real worry is Tracey’s bad influence on her daughter. The narrator has heard her say that Tracey, who has already started hanging out with rough boys, is destined to become a single mom. When she looks at her mother, she is shocked to see angry tears in her eyes.

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Few emotions are more unnerving to a child than pity for a parent. The narrator thinks of her mother as impervious, not quite mortal, but Tracey exposes her fear of losing control over the life she has fought to make for herself. An idealist with a pedantic streak and “a political mind,” she is forever initiating community-improvement programs. If her husband quibbles about the vacuuming, she lectures him on “the importance of having a revolutionary consciousness, or the relative insignificance of sexual love when placed beside the struggles of the people, or the legacy of slavery in the hearts and minds of the young, and so on.” She wants to rise in the world, and, amazingly, she does, eventually getting elected to Parliament. Childhood is an experience of bursting through the chrysalis of family to fly off into the world beyond, but the narrator’s own growth is outstripped by that of her mother, who is all too willing to leave domestic life for a public one when the time is right.

Yet, as devoted as the mother is to the principle of the people, she remains aloof from them in reality. Although she loves to talk of Africa as homeland, she avoids the topic of Jamaica, the site of a brutal childhood she doesn’t care to discuss. Changing one’s voice is a motif in Smith’s fiction, a new accent and diction the best costume in which to disguise an identity better left behind, and the narrator’s mother has all but scrubbed away her native patois. Unless the past is actively contained, she feels, it may surge up to flood the present and drown the future. This is the threat that she sees in Tracey and wants her daughter to recognize. Tracey is on track to train as a professional dancer, but dancing is a vain ambition. School is the only sure way up and out, and when she runs into Tracey’s mother she brags of her own daughter’s academic accomplishments. “She was in a competition of caring, and yet her fellow contestants, like Tracey’s mother, were so ill-equipped when placed beside her that it was a fatally lopsided battle,” Smith’s narrator thinks. “I often wondered: is it some kind of a trade-off? Do others have to lose so we can win?”

The question runs like a bright thread through “Swing Time,” as it does through Smith’s larger body of work. She has often used the device of doubling, planting two characters together to observe the different ways they grow, and the soil she chooses tends to be her own. “White Teeth” featured Millat and Magid Iqbal, twins in Willesden, Smith’s childhood neighborhood, whose father separates them at the age of ten, keeping one in London, where he becomes a hapless Muslim fundamentalist, and sending the other to be brought up in Bangladesh, where he devotes himself to a life of science. The protagonists of “NW,” Leah and Keisha, are Willesden childhood friends; Leah, who is white, stays in the neighborhood, leading a comfortable, if static, life, while Keisha, who is black, changes her name to the more bourgeois Natalie, becomes a barrister, marries rich, and feels like a fraud. These are not trade-offs, exactly. Neither Leah nor Natalie considers herself a winner. Magid doesn’t have to turn out good for Millat to turn out bad. (For that matter, a novelist from Willesden, admired since the age of twenty-four, has not had her success at the expense of another girl from down the street.) No great principle of cosmic causality is at work; it just feels that way.

Tracey’s true foil in the novel isn’t the narrator, who never attempts to scale the heights of fame that Tracey seeks, but Aimee, the narrator’s boss. Like Tracey, Aimee is a talented girl from nowhere—Bendigo, Australia, in this case—but where Tracey’s career sputters out after a few chorus gigs on the West End Aimee is a beloved queen of pop known more for her persona than for any particular musical style, shifting her sound with the times to stay on top of the charts.

Why does one make it and not the other? Aimee would chalk it up to fortune, which, mixed with a drop of positive thinking, she sees as the universe’s prime mover. “She has no tragic side,” Smith’s narrator observes. “She accepts everything that has happened to her as her destiny, no more surprised or alienated to be who she is than I imagine Cleopatra was to be Cleopatra.” She refuses to recognize the impediments of economics, geography, race, and history, just as she shrugs off the degree to which her life depends on the work of other people. The narrator sums up the tasks that fall to the celebrity’s personal assistant with a mordant list: “I scheduled abortions, hired dog walkers, ordered flowers, wrote Mother’s Day cards, applied creams, administered injections, squeezed spots, wiped very occasional break-up tears.”

The narrator goes to work for Aimee when she is in her early twenties, a recent college graduate unsure what kind of person she should try to be. She has no particular ambition; she has tried on various poses in disparate crowds. (Smith is wonderful on black conspiracy theorists who look to the supernatural to explain the unbearable phenomena of racism and inequality, and on the plight of the lone black girl in a group of goths, powdering her face ghostly pale.) Floating in Aimee’s bubble of bland international luxury—the private flights and cars, the town houses in London and Manhattan—doesn’t provide her with an adult identity so much as it allows her to defer her search for one.