In her foreword to this new collection of essays, Zadie Smith describes a dinner in Rome with old friends. You can almost taste the cacio e pepe and smell the Tiber. Then the magic is broken as Smith tells how one of her tablemates decided to reduce her to a tagline: “But of course your writing has so far been a 15-year psychodrama.”
Smith writes: “Everyone laughed — so did I — but I was a little stung by the idea, and worried at the idea for a few weeks. Now here I am bringing it up in this foreword.” But, rather than spitting out the comment and moving on, she sticks her fork in and starts twirling self-doubt.
The often polarising 42-year-old author of the novels White Teeth, On Beauty and, most recently, Swing Time admits that for years she has often wondered if she is “ludicrous”. She is concerned that her essays have “not a leg to stand on”. All they have is their freedom, she writes. Hence this book’s title. You wonder, because the foreword is so apologetic, bordering on negative advertising, whether this collection was forced on her by a hungry publisher eager to get another Smith out in the desert period between novels.
It’s a shame because the collection itself — 33 essays, columns and reviews written between 2008 and 2017 for various, mostly American, publications — is a delicious hodgepodge of ideas that show Smith’s breadth of interest and thoughtfulness. It’s stretching: a yoga class for the mind.
She’s at her best when discussing her private passions, the writers, singers and artists who most inspire her. In The House That Hova Built, originally published in The New York Times Magazine, she interviews Shawn Carter (otherwise known as Jay-Z) in an Italian café in Manhattan, where the “rap superstar, husband of Beyoncé, minority owner of the [Brooklyn] Nets” likes to eat his “chicken parms”. She considers him one of the great poets, is clearly in awe, and this is not a journalistic interview, but a meeting of minds that informs an essay. “At the last minute I remembered to ask about his family,” she writes halfway down the final page.
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Nevertheless, she made me see the rapper and businessman in a new light. His albums are “showrooms of hip-hop, displaying the various possibilities of the form”, she writes elegantly, but then is in danger of being sent to Pseud’s Corner when she analyses the lyric-writing technique of Jay-Z, who “at times restricts himself formally, like the Oulipo, that experimental French literary group of the Sixties”. Alors!
She is closer to her comfort zone — writing in the first person — in an essay written as an introduction for a collection of 1950s photographs of the singer Billie Holiday, another Smith idol. She gets her voice just right. “All respect to Ella [Fitzgerald], all respect to Sarah [Vaughan], but when those gals open their mouths to sing, well, to you it’s like someone just opened a brand-new Frigidaire.”
Smith is good too on Joni Mitchell. Attunement focuses on her initial dislike and eventual love of the Canadian singer-songwriter, in which she contemplates what our choices of music say, audience anxiety and her gratitude to Mitchell for leading her out of her musical home of rap and hip-hop.
The On the Bookshelf section of the collection exposes her writerly loves. In her essay on JG Ballard I appreciated her ability to meet a hero and not connect, but still feel passionately towards him (they had an awkward conversation on a boat, early in her career). They were “ships passing in the night” because he was trying to break out of the establishment and Smith was trying to break in. Smith gives him a critical smacker: “Reservoirs are to Ballard what clouds were to Wordsworth.” Lovely.
Hanif Kureishi also receives a genuflection. Smith explains that his Buddha of Suburbia was handed around her northwest London school like “contraband” and made me want to read it again. Likewise, in The I Who Is Not Me, her respect for Philip Roth, as a fellow outsider (Jewish when the literary world was Waspy; prone to writing dislikeable leads), is explored and made me reassess an author I have never got on with. “I stole Portnoy’s liberties long ago to address my own project,” she writes. “I took from Roth the liberty to create free characters behaving with freedom, independent of obligation, some good, some bad, some admirable, some perverse, some downright evil.”
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Occasionally her imposition of dead philosophers’ ideas on contemporary culture gets a little wearying, reminding me of the Julie Burchill/Charlotte Raven-era Modern Review of the early 1990s. In Meet Justin Bieber! it gets a bit silly as she imagines a conversation between the pop star and Martin Buber, the dead Jewish philosopher, and deconstructs Bieber’s song Boyfriend to explain what they have in common. “Buber and Bieber are, again, rather close — not only in name but in spirit — for Buber is likewise entirely preoccupied with relationships.” The idea works rather better in another essay, in which she explains why Charlie Kaufman’s 2015 film Anomalisa is pure Schopenhauer.
Those who want to know more about what makes the author tick will learn a lot about Smith, even if it’s all on her own terms. In Generation Why? we hear of her struggle with social networking. In Love in the Garden she describes holidays with her father and her time living in Italy.
In the final essay she ponders “pleasure” (eating, observing other people’s faces) and “joy” (having children, falling in love) and how much of each is a good thing. She writes that she has felt real joy only five or six times, but admits that she wouldn’t necessarily want more because “it proves such a difficult emotion to manage”. Pleasure, on the other hand, is a frequent, easygoing emotion. “I experience at least a little pleasure every day,” she writes.
Me too — and ogling Smith’s interesting, muddled, unsure, always-inquiring mind would have sent me over my daily pleasure quota, were I to have had one. Smith acts as a cultural DJ spinning her reflections and experiences for us. It’s a club night you’ll want to return to, even if you don’t want to dance to all her songs.
Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith, Hamish Hamilton, 452pp, £20
