Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith.

What a name!

At once powerful and simple. Both full of possibility and full of the very ordinary. No wonder her work is so layered and complex. Her intellectual engagement in Swing Time is so rich and yet I’m left feeling a kind of painful isolation, just as her narrator is distanced from the world around her. Unnamed, she lives an observational rather than visceral life.

For as deeply engaging as Swing Time is at the ideas level, there is little engagement emotionally. We are told about the intense relationship the narrator has with her childhood friend and it’s all there on the page but it’s also not there at the feelings level. It’s as if there is an emotional un-filter.

Most of the key characters are so intensely focused on themselves that they lack connection with others. Take the clear-eyed portrait of Aimee, whom the narrator works for, a Madonna grade popstar, so intensely narcissistic that she thinks all material circumstance is a consequence of personality rather than economics or the way society has structured itself to include and exclude.

On the other end of the scale though there is the narrator’s mother who has no skill for the time-management required by mothers, yet has the time management to save the world – narcissistic in her own intense way.

Both these characters, two of the most significant women in the narrator’s life, are a centre unto themselves, the rest of the adoring world inconsequential and yet at the same time at the very heart of their existence: in Aimee’s case, her star-struck fans, and in the narrator’s mother’s case, the people she helps to rise up out of structural poverty and disadvantaged, who likewise adore her.

Characters interact rather than connect, so it always seems, that like the Unnamed Narrator, we as readers are likewise kept at an observational distance.

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