Zadie Smith
Feel Free
Hamish Hamilton
When a literary figure as eminent as Zadie Smith publishes a work of non-fiction, we have a tendency to hope for explanations, diagnoses or answers – in other words, comfort and coherence. While Smith’s latest collection, Feel Free, offers aperçu and insight aplenty, its true edifications lie in how these wide-ranging essays and reviews eschew the kind of shallow didacticism that has come to mire much of today’s political and cultural commentary.
Fittingly, the collection opens with an essay set in Willesden Green, London, the neighbourhood which served as the backdrop for her acclaimed first novel, White Teeth. Entitled “Northwest London Blues”, its locus is a public library under threat of closure, from which Smith educes a poignant meditation on the pathos of rootedness and pride of place. Most importantly, Smith fears how these ways of relating to what we typically call home risk erasure in the face of a seeming inexorability: London’s gentrification. The essay also showcases Smith’s unique ability to extrapolate from the personal to the universal in a way that invests her musings with truly credible sincerity, while never seeming self-aggrandising.
In a moment of notable intellectual boldness, referencing Graham Greene, Smith states: “England made me.” With nationalism renascent, it’s a striking declaration whose valence has utterly transformed since the publication of White Teeth, a novel famously abrim with exuberance and optimism. Indeed, some have taken umbrage with Smith’s willingness to castigate what she calls her and others’ “liberal paranoia.” Yet she demonstrates a particular acumen for treating with refreshing nuance and rectitude issues that are often subject to either venal absolutes on the political right, or paralysing reticence on the left. Overall, the more overtly political pieces evince a circumspection, if not conservatism, that seems newly-found. In “Of Optimism and Despair”, she writes: “I believe in human limitation, not out of any sense of fatalism, but out of learned caution, gleaned from both recent and distant history.”
In their capaciousness the book’s five sections (“In the World”; “In the Audience”; “In the Gallery”; “On the Book Shelf”; and “Feel Free”) go well beyond ruminations – however judicious – on political and cultural transformation. Smith is of course a highly regarded critic of text and image, one both perspicacious and equipped with a novelist’s flair for description. Take her Nabokovian rendering of J. G. Ballard, “that moon of a face, the shiny tonsure, the lank side-curtains of hair – ghost of a defrocked priest.”
While scrupulous, her literary judgements nonetheless lack the temerity of tone that we often glean from academic writing. She reads from the vantage point of the author, her musings leveraged by kindred sympathy. As she writes of Geoff Dyer, her criticism is profoundly novelistic. Most appealing of all perhaps is how her appraisals of the writers for whom she feels affinity and affection – Ballard, Dyer, Woolf, Roth, Kureishi – rarely drift into sycophantic frisson (see Martin Amis on Bellow or Nabokov).
These essays’ more elegiac tone is tempered by an optimism that Smith reserves for the literary endeavour itself and its “primary impulse”: the freedom it promises. And while the apparent simplicity of her literary dictates can seem almost quaint (“three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self”), their confluence proffers complexity galore.
Words – Luke Warde
