Zadie Smith

I guess this should be a general Zadie Smith thread, since there isn't one yet, but mostly I wanted to ask if anyone had seen this NYRB piece of hers, about ... language and multiplicity and Obama, among other things:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22334

(She impresses me more and more, and I'm kind of bummed I finished my grad program right before she started teaching there.)

James Franco, Zadie Smith, who will be next?

I haven't read this essay yet, but it looks promising. Alfred called it "excellent" in a blog post yesterday.

I read an interview with Elizabeth Shue where she said she was planning to go there right when I did, but then skipped out to take a role in something! I would have been pretty psyched to do workshops with Elizabeth Shue.

All I hear about James Franco is that he speaks very LOUDLY, but this is a thread about Zadie Smith and her NYRB piece and how great On Beauty was.

liveblogging but otherwise i forget:

- it's a vintage theme in this country, and pretty much all true so far, except

- "There's no quicker way to insult an ex-pat Scotsman in London than to tell him he's lost his accent." it's *such* a vintage theme, and we forget that the british "literary culture" or "literary intelligentsia" is a scottish, 19th century invention. and within this milieu, keeping one's scots accent has not been uniformly desired, case in point being francis jeffrey, founder of the ur-literary review, the edinburgh. not that he managed to lose it altogether, but just sayin.

I wish I remembered On Beauty well enough to come up with a somewhat adequate post about it. . . but I hated it. It was mega-boring and I loved White Teeth. (And I will also admit reading The Autograph Man). But this essay looks awesome.

White Teeth > On Beauty > The Autograph Man.

On Beauty surprised me by being really really great.

Will have to read this piece, soon.

The thing that amazed me about On Beauty was this: there's a decent number of books that want to have something to do with race, but they tend to symbolize or metaphorize issues about race, which is weird because race is something that people are totally conscious of as they live it -- On Beauty really surprised me by being able to take themes about race and have characters who are actively and consciously living them, and talking about them, in a completely natural way, in addition to having that stuff dramatized in plot terms. This is even leaving alone the fact that she's perceptive about race and would appear to have a firmer grasp on it, just experientially, than a lot of people who want to tackle it in fiction.

I don't know. The conservative father (I forget his name) didn't seem convincingly rendered, and the Howards End parallels forced. Telecommunications and more mixed race relations would seem to have made Forster's "only connect" epigraph more resonant than it was a hundred years ago, but...I dunno.

I read an interview with Elizabeth Shue where she said she was planning to go there right when I did, but then skipped out to take a role in something! I would have been pretty psyched to do workshops with Elizabeth Shue.

This is giving me Hamlet 2 flashbacks. I will need the afternoon to recover.

Wowowowowow. Thanks for the essay link, Nabisco, I like her citations and conclusions.

On Beauty is perhaps the best-edited of her books; most people who do down White Teeth (which I love) cite the cuts they believe the first third of the novel requires...but as for The Autograph Man, meh.

That's a lovely article. I like things like this, celebrating uncertainty and ambiguity. It makes me feel quite awkward when I'm reading or arguing with people who feel passionately about everything, and given that I read the opinion pieces in about four newspapers everyday I often have a nagging feeling of dullness and nothing-to-say. Interesting as these things are, I've come to realise that I don't really care about outcomes very much, so long as things are done right. It's nice to be reminded that this is a strength too.

I haven't read the new NYRB yet (it just arrived yesterday), but Smith's article there in November took my breath away. This is firstly because it's clearly and beautifully written, but secondly and more importantly because it helped with my own ongoing reflection on realism and its discontents in mathematics, which I understand as a narrative practice that in our day is subject to anxieties like those Smith is describing.

I started reading White Teeth recently precisely because every essay or non-fiction piece I've ever read by her has been fantastic. Not as into the novel, but I'll have to give On Beauty a shot after I finish WT.

I really like 'White Teeth'--a big, exuberant, over-long, needed-editing, lots-of-fun first novel. But 'Autograph Man' was unfinishable, and so I couldn't even be bothered with 'On Beauty' (I've already read and loved 'Howard's End, so why do I need to read a pallid knock-off of it?)

it was a good piece. sometimes her pieces in the nyrb drive me crazy, though--she's so smart she feels like she has to make things up when she's doing the lit crit thing sometimes it seems to me. she's obviously a crazy talented writer, and i loved on beauty for a while. it fell apart for me at the end--it was like she was trying to make it a Novel of Ideas or something, and it failed at that. but the characters were fantastic. one of these days she's going to write a perfect novel, i'm sure. (autograph man is horrible; i don't know what happened there.)

ha i feel like this post makes no sense. i have a lot of THOUGHTS about zadie smith. also she read from on beauty at my school a couple of years ago and in addition to being totally beautiful she was very well-dressed, and she read a comic scene and was hilarious and adorable doing it. i sort of hate her and want her life.

White Teeth is horrible book written by one who has not a clue about the subjects of her story (Bengali's, Indians, soldiers etc. etc.)

i was going to start this thread the other day!

i like HER a lot even if i sometimes find her books and essays frustrating. and her personality shines through in them.

for me usually the ratio of good to bad ideas in her work is 3:2 or so

yeah that would have been a shorter way to say what i feel. i'm rooting for her.

this essay is an example of essays of hers that make me crazy because she is straight making shit up:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22083

she has a book of nonfiction coming out called 'fail better'--dunno if its a collection of essays or a book-length study or what

it's like i can't just write a book review, that's too easy and i have all these brains; why don't i construct a grand problem with the novel out of thin air and act like it's a real thing?

is that a "zadie smith" problem or a "new york review of books" problem tho?

http://faculty.sunydutchess.edu/oneill/failbetter.htm

i thought about that when i was writing that, but nothing about the two paths diverged in a yellow wood for the novel tack she takes in that review is true! wtf is "lyrical Realism" anyway? her characterization of Flaubert is so off i sort of think she did it on purpose just to fuck with me!

this is probably happening all the time in the nyrb but novels are the only thing i know anything about so ;_;

her characterization of Flaubert is so off i sort of think she did it on purpose just to fuck with me!

this is making me chuckle way more than it has any right to

it's like i can't just write a book review, that's too easy and i have all these brains; why don't i construct a grand problem with the novel out of thin air and act like it's a real thing?

It worked for Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen and B.R. Myers.

It depends what you mean by "worked".

i sort of hate her and want her life

Haha, yes. Thinking about her articles, it's the sense of confidence that shines through everywhere and is amazingly attractive - even if she is talking rot (I wouldn't know, I don't know or care what lyrical realism is and I don't think it matters, I just want to read good stories). I need to be a bit more like that

She's definitely impressively ahead of her times, publishing that article on 26 February 2009. Maybe if she finds this thread she can tell us about the events of the next fortnight, starting with this weekend's FA Cup results.

I am quite impressed that she can write long, erudite articles, and will try to find time to read that one, as well as the Lyrical Realism one.

White Teeth strikes me as rather a farrago - a kind of sham, or a frequently ... teeth-grindingly painful performance of what she thinks a cool novel might be, by someone not yet old enough to know better. It is excusable that a 25-year-old should be gauche and foolish - it's not really her fault other people celebrated her so. Maybe she is less foolish now.

The "Two Paths for the Novel" piece grated on me a bit when I read it for reasons similar to what horseshoe said above--"why are we inventing this dichotomy?"

I haven't read the Obama piece yet, I'll have to do that tomorrow.

thats a great essay. i need more time to read it though :( *cuts and pastes*

white teeth i preferred the channel 4 mini series of, compared to the book. i think i prefer zadies articles to her actual novels. i had another book of hers, piece of flesh, which she edited and wrote an introduction for, and i found that more informed than her fiction. white teeth seriously needed editing and just reminded me that just cos someone lives alongside all diff types of people and communities, doesnt mean they actually have any insight into them. everyone seemed a bit thin and scant, like there was nothing really to them apart from surface immigrant cliches (i read it when it came out so cant really remember that well) that you could easily pick up from any other shallow bit of tv or writing about those communities.

basically i prefer her as a kind of literary figure/journalist/lecturer (?) etc to novelist. i still find it dissapointing that this supposed 'voice of modern multi cultural london' came through the exact same oxbridge route as so many others, which might be a reason WT, read so hollow (though not to critics, evidently) after she assimiliated all the things she 'thought she should'. maybe if she wrote white teeth before she changed from her 'willesden' voice to a cambridge one, it might have *felt* a bit more real.

Not to jump on your turn of phrase, but if they were only 'surface immigrant cliches' like those from 'any other shallow bit of tv or writing about those communities,' they wouldn't be as FUNNY as White Teeth is. Like I understand people criticizing WT as a shaggy first book, needing editing, etc., and I understand people reacting to a press narrative that said the book told us something important about multiculturalism in late 20th Century Britain, but let's not forget that there's great comedy in the book, and you don't get great comedy without great characters.

What if you don't think WT is funny? I think it's painfully, embarrassingly glib.

But again: it's better to be painfully glib at 25, and have time to learn to write better, than to be painfully glib at 40-50-60 like Rushdie has been for decades. In that sense I am coming to think that she is a better writer than him. Well, how could she not be?

Although I disagree with your assessment of WT, sir, that you've used this forum as an opportunity to assail the 'venerable' Mr. Rushdie I can only salute for its righteousness.

I read the "Speaking In Tongues" article in the NYRB this morning and it's astonishing. I'm still not sure how to think about having two identities and having them both be true. Her view isn't that that we can choose our identities, that these are all a construct, a la Nietzsche as I read him. Instead, it's that we can be the "I" we are, authentically, but that this "I" can have multiple...identities? sides? It's hard to say. But if it works, it's a way of preserving authenticity talk while promoting pluralism of identity.

'I' is like being a kaleidoscope: all the same stuff is in the tube, it's the perspective which changes how it is seen.

Ok, suzy, that sounds right. But seen by who? Does my own perspective on what "I" I am change? I mean: to what extent does she think we're telling our own stories of ourselves, and to what extent are our stories telling us?

I have just come from drinking pink champagne at a launch, hard to answer and/or type. But the kaleidoscope comparison works for me. I think our perspective of self-identity is completely mutable at all times, even with having a few non-negotiables in yr own narrative.

Also people can we get Zadie timeline right please? Girl wrote WT at 22, the publishers were brought to frenzy by a story in a college anthology which exists as the part of WT where she intros the people at the school.

A couple of nice quotes on the theme:
Walt Whitman: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes"
and my favourite:
Keith Richards (on Mick): "Yeah, he's a lovely bunch of guys"

So, we are angrily instructed to be aware, ZS wrote WT at 22? Fine; that just explains all the better why it can ring so callow and false. I'm rereading it now and still haven't found the funny stuff that Gooblar hears in it. But once again, that's not to deny that she may have matured or improved.

I have read half or most of the new NYRB piece. So far it seems fine (and a better essay than WT is a novel): quite unexceptionable and sensible, if a bit self-regarding.

I dunno pf, the NW London she describes in WT is very familiar to me. Or, it completes a picture of something I had half of in an interesting way that makes sense to me. She and I have weird overlaps in subject matter (and potential subject matter) and I don't hate her for it; obviously it does not ring false to me.

Huge, huge difference btwn 22 and 25 - she got the deal before she left Cambridge. It shows in the prologue bit being really long and the ending being a bit meh, but the book builds out from the short story/chapter with the school; most of what's around that is strong and she's funny. FACT: WT was the first big book her recently promoted editor bought/worked on for new employers; I'm pretty sure it was delivered in chunks rather than all at once. Both do much tighter work now, being more experienced.

I bought White Teeth today. Ere I start it, pinefox, what are you taking issue with exactly?

I'm not urging you, or anyone, not to read it. I think I've already briefly indicated what I think is poor about it. I could try to describe it at greater length, though it's hard to believe anyone wants that.

In the NYRB piece, oh, dear:

(Is it not, for example, experientially true that one can both believe and not believe in God?)

You go, girl: Zadie Smith recorded an essay about the funding of UK public services such as libraries for BBC Radio 4. It's awesome.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9439000/9439821.stm

Such a great essayist.

yeah this was good, then they had this incredible twerp at the end to rebut, some failed tory PPC, who said people who worked in libraries were creaming off loads of taxpayers' money

Terrific essay, and yes that guy giving the counterpoint is a colossal buffoon; his gist seemed to be that whilst both ZS and he used libraries, and he *still* uses libraries for free internet, and there is no real alternative for people without access to books or internet at home, they should all be shut. In other words he is the Wile E Coyote that ZS makes reference to!

new novel out, just like that? reviews are not making it sound great. :/

thx for the heads up, i'll rep for on beauty as one of the best novels of the last decade.

kakutani is kind of dismissive in her review but if her idea that on beauty : howard's end :: new one : mrs dalloway holds up i'm pretty interested.

though on beauty's very overt tribute to howards end was part of its ballsy charm as for whatever reason, in the US at least, em forster is not taken seriously by Serious Minded Literary Dudes despite being super awesome while woolf is beloved of Serious Minded Literary Dudes, or at least the idea of woolf is beloved, of course i am basing all of this on an offhand comment by michiko kakutani who is basically completely wrong even at the best of times so i'll wait til the amazon man comes

she has a jay-z profile in new yorker or new york times recently. that's a very strange form of promoting a novel if that is one. is that a common thing?

“NW,” the title of Zadie Smith’s clunky new novel, refers to northwest London, where she grew up — a multicultural corner of the city that will be familiar to readers of her dazzling debut, “White Teeth.” In that earlier book Ms. Smith took a contemporary London mapped by writers like Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi and claimed it decisively as her own. There are glimpses, here and there in “NW,” of that cacophonous metropolis — a city in constant flux as waves of immigrants and fierce youth reinvent it year by year, day by day — but “NW” is a much smaller, more meager book than “White Teeth.”

it's just like, why do people take this person seriously

wait what person and why shouldn't they? cliffs notes plz

it's from the kakutani review

and because every sentence there is both clichéd and wrong

thank you

I dunno if this is the whole story, but i think kakutani writing a review from the POV of a cat or something might have affected her credibility at some point.

*writes down 'cat review'*

cat review

btw googling "michiko kakutani" brings up a picture of a person who i am pretty sure is hilariously not michiko kakutani in the right hand info box thing. i like to imagine that this is retaliatory SEO from a miffed reviewee.

It's weird: everyone seems to take Zadie Smith seriously as this infinitely wise critical commentator and novelist. But she wrote a very good but flawed debut novel, a really bad second novel, an apparently great 3rd novel (but it was ripping of Forster in a big way), and now this dodgy-sounding 4th novel. plus some pretty crap short stories. So where'd all the respect come from?

the first novel is overrated and the second novel is underrated but then i would say that

i think theres some really good stuff in 'autograph man' even if borders on the grotesque

Admittedly, I couldn''t finish it: maybe the good stuff came later

i think smith's willingness to write a bad novel is part of her charm--like lamp wrote, there's some good stuff in autograph man, enough to keep it interesting imo, and white teeth is just as busted in its way, but she doesn't hide behind Major Youngish Novelist and play it safe/boring as fuck a la franzen or mitchell.

Her Obama essay is good. The Forster-indebted novel is good. She's so young though.

i think smith's willingness to write a bad novel is part of her charm

Yes, but it was hardly a deliberate plan!

the new one was interesting

Snagged a library copy of NW. The reviews are mixed. Anyone read it yet?

i want to because it sounds like a change for her? i've never been totally convinced by her as a fiction writer.

it sounds like she's come down more on the remainder side of the questions posited by that big remainder/netherland review, going by the reviews.

I read On Beauty exactly seven years ago in the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma, trying to figure out how she could get the parallels to Forster so wrong.

My gf likes her, but I haven't read her yet. Found this preview of a reading she did of interest:

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/43335/zadie-smith-at-sixth-i-thursday-oct-18/

Here's part of it:

The larger cultural conversation seems to be able to stomach only one Serious Novel every year, which makes Smith’s newest one, with the usual reviews and essays as well as multitudinous NPR appearances and online-journal considerations so exhaustive they feel like TV-show recaps, this year’s Freedom. That’s because NW is Smith’s first book in eight years, following On Beauty, which we—the effete liberal crowd—all sort of ignored because we cared more for the importance and gravity and bombasticness and precociousness of her first novel, White Teeth. This is also because NW addresses class, race, wealth, public housing, childhood friends, and gentrification. In a world that can’t get away from any of the above, we’ve latched onto NW to soothe our social-justice consciouses (Smith identifies the race only of her white characters. Subversive!). Though a not-small number of critics has quibbled with it (on Fresh Air, Maureen Corrigan called the book’s ending “preposterous”; a Guardian blog post mocked Smith’s prose, which occasionally resembles a car crash between James Joyce and e.e. cummings), NW is undoubtedly the year’s biggest literary release.

http://i.imgur.com/izHYs.jpg

The larger cultural conversation seems to be able to stomach only one Serious Novel every year,

*barf*

yeah, that's groany

I might be out of touch w/ british book talk, but I don't feel like I've heard quite as much about this as I thought I would. Obvs it was pushed quite hard (only book I've seen flyposters for on walworth road) but I'm not really hearing discussion, enthusiasm that much.

Read the first couple of chapters of this but wasn't really grabbed. Find it a bit dubious, these mid-career Brit novelists like ZS and Will Self acting all "well, we've always had a dance Modernist element to our writing". Is it all down to that Josipovici book a couple of years ago?

I suspect that's probably because it'll turn out to not be all that good. Which would be a shame - I still haven't read one of hers and I'd like to; I was sorry it wasn't chosen for our book club. I like her essays, I'm interested in the idea, I've liked the briefest descriptions of NW that I've seen ... but I've browsed it a few times now and nothing has even begun to grab me.

this book wasn't very good. it's not even a "bad novel" like i was talking abt upthread, it just works the same ol zadie smith themes with the same ol zadie smith characters until i just don't give a f anymore.

Was an xp; Stevie's beaten me to it.

xps

I think there's been a more general dissatisfaction with The Retreat From MODERNITY in the air for a while? The josipovici book caught something that I felt was around in various forms - cult of Bernhard, Remainder, idk what else.

tbf to the Self his sounds like it might be using modernism to talk about modernism historically, which has piqued my i.

tbf to the Self his sounds like it might be using modernism to talk about modernism historically, which has piqued my i.

by which i think i mean there's a nostalgia for difficulty or kitsch of modernism or attachment to the signifiers of seriousness that this kind of thing can topple into, and it sounds like Self might be taking that on. Still unlikely to read it, but it's not my ignore list.

on my ignore list

nostalgia for difficulty or kitsch of modernism

i got the first inkling of this w/ coe's bs johnson biog

I'm enjoying NW a lot, but it's my first Zadie ever and I don't read tons of modern novels, so.

Finished NW and not sure what I thought about it. I loved White Teeth, loved aspects of Alphabet Man, never read on On Beauty, love many of her essays. I wanted to like this much more than I did, but it went off the rails for me abut 3/4 of the way in and I'm not positive what the final section was meant to convey

*SPOILERS*

were we to believe Nathan killed Felix? Or just that, Nathalie and Leah, wanting so badly to distance themselves from their past, turn Nathan in as the killer, despite his having nothing to do with it? Either way, it wasn't very satisfying, and I never completely bought hat Nathalie would have been dabbling in the sexual stuff she did. Not sure. . . . I thought Leah was a much better depicted character. But perhaps that was the intention; Nathalie was missing a core identity so anything she did seemed a put on.

The penguin US edition calls Felix "Fox" on the back cover. Seriously, doesn't anyone proofread things? I kept waiting for a character named Fox to show up, and thought the foxes were some allusion to that. Then I realized it was a typo.

http://lithub.com/in-praise-of-zadie-smiths-london/

Uninterested in her but this is a nice feature on ZS as someone to look up to.

there was a BBC adaptation of NW on tv a few weeks ago. Watchable but can't say I really enjoyed it.

Her new one, Swing Time, involving dance is getting the standard praise but I haven't read it.

finished swing time this morning and found it enjoyable but not overly engrossing. NW similarly didn't make much of an impression on me as i can recall almost nothing about it.

I'm enjoying Swing Time, but I still haven't read NW. A friend said that Swing Time is kinda her take on Elena Ferrante, which rings true in many ways.

I read NW and loved it, kind of a bummer to go back and see that ILB did not feel the same way. I wonder if people would feel differently now? I had zero expectations going in. It also helped that I recently read her most recent essay collection, so it was interesting to see the things that are verifiably 'her' distributed across different characters etc.

Also NW is actually much more Ferrante-ish in premise than Swing Time (looks like it came out in the same year as the first of the Neapolitan novels).

Has anyone been present at a performance of The Wife of Willesden or read the play and had thoughts they want to share?