White Teeth author Zadie Smith’s new novel tackles race, class and fame

Zadie Smith says therapy has given her more confidence in the writing process. Picture: Getty Images

Dressed in a deep-red turban and backless evening dress, and looking every bit the 1940s glamour queen, Zadie Smith last month wowed a small but high-powered audience at New York’s Carlyle Hotel. The Orange Prize-winning and Man Booker shortlisted author was not giving a reading from her latest novel, Swing Time, which is released next week.

Rather, she was singing for the likes of Lady Gaga and Gloria Steinem at an event hosted by The New York TimesT magazine. As she leaned into a baby grand, her hands fluttering like restless birds, her deep, husky voice confidently lassoed the low-slung notes of the 1937 jazz classic Easy Living. Smith was one of seven “greats”, including Lady Gaga, who had been asked to do something outside their field of expertise, but it was the writer’s musical turn that made headlines. A correspondent for the Vulture website joked: “Internationally acclaimed author Zadie Smith can sing too, which is totally fair,” while Elle magazine called Smith’s performance “jaw-droppingly good”.

Smith, a Londoner who lives in New York, had sung cabaret in hotels when she was a student at Cambridge University, but she tells Review that before her Carlyle Hotel gig “I hadn’t sung in about 20 years. I was very nervous. I’m not much of a performer when it comes to singing, I just like to focus on the piano and get through the song.” Then comes the self-deprecating punchline, which Londoners, even transplanted ones such as Smith, do so well: “It reminded me of why I don’t do it, yeah.” So no plans for an album? “No, no. Don’t worry,” she fires back smoothly.

Smith’s latest novel may not focus directly on music but it explores its close relation — dance, and more specifically, its deep connection with the African diaspora. Two mixed-race girls from a London council housing estate — the kind of estate on which Smith grew up — meet at a dance class and form a close, complicated and sometimes cruel friendship. Tracey is the dominant personality and better dancer, while the other girl — like Smith, the daughter of a white English father and Jamaican mother — remains passive and unnamed. This quietly detached yet acutely observant character is the novel’s narrator, and she ends up on a very different path to that of the troubled Tracey.

Swing Time by Zadie Smith.
Swing Time by Zadie Smith.

The narrator becomes an assistant to a famous pop star called Aimee, and surrenders her identity as she travels the world with the self-made and self-involved celebrity from Bendigo, Australia. As celebrities do, Aimee develops philanthropic ambitions for a West African country — and ends up adopting a baby “as easily as she might order a limited edition handbag from Japan”.

When I ring Smith to talk about her saga of fame and racial and class division, she answers the phone in a flat, wary tone. It’s the voice of a still-tense mother who has just managed to get her three-year-old, Harvey, off to sleep. Could I possibly call her back in one minute on the landline, she asks politely in her distinctive London accent, a disorienting mix of dropped “Ts” and elegantly elongated vowels. When I ring back, three minutes later, Smith is ready to talk business. Like a shape-shifter, she has resumed her identity as a celebrity author, one of a diminishing coterie whose novel releases are bona fide news events.

Now 41, she was just 21 and still at university when she landed a $500,000 advance for her debut novel, White Teeth, which was declared a literary blockbuster even before it was published. A rollicking, exuberant portrait of multicultural London, it told the story of three ethnically diverse families and was hailed by critics for its sly humour, verbal pyrotechnics and richly textured characterisation. Given her precocious talent, exotic beauty and humble background, Smith received a lot of media attention. Her publisher hailed her as “the new Salman Rushdie” and she has since collected a Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Orange Prize and a Man Booker nomination (the biggest gong, the Man Booker Prize, has eluded her, however).

In Swing Time, we find the British-Jamaican writer back amid the tower blocks and racially diverse streets and schools that shaped her and much of her writing. One reviewer claims her latest portrait of London is less optimistic than it was in her earlier books, but she says Swing Time simply reflects her maturing perspective: “I think life looks different at 41 from 22. If it didn’t, that would be kind of insane,” she says, laughing huskily. “I still love to write about the city. It is still something that inspires me enormously.”

This is her fifth novel but her first to tell a story in the first person — a narrative technique she has been “a bit contemptuous of” in the past. “I just wanted to do something different,” she says of her mid-career embrace of the first person pronoun. “I was curious about it.” Because her earlier, polyphonic fiction is often written from the viewpoints of different characters, “I couldn’t see how the first person would allow for that; it’s so concerned with itself and first-person novels tend to be narrower”. Nevertheless, she plunged in.

She reveals that therapy may have helped her to complete the 453-page Swing Time. In fact, bizarrely, she seems more comfortable talking about her therapy than she does about writing. Without a shred of self-consciousness, she says: “I had never had therapy and I live in New York and every other soul did, so I did it [too].” She suggests it may have helped to make the writing process “a bit smoother, because normally I spend a lot of time thinking it’s not going well, so it’s easier to be a bit more confident as you write and to move a bit faster”.

Asked why she made her pop diva, Aimee, an Aussie from Bendigo, she chuckles as she answers: “I have some friends from Bendigo, which is part of it. But I’m also interested in the idea of marginal places. I wanted somebody who was like, globally moving, who’d come a very, very long way — and also to amuse my friends.” She confirms there are aspects of Madonna and Angelina Jolie in Aimee but traits of other people too. She stresses she didn’t create this character “as some kind of celebrity take-down”.

Despite her denials Aimee is based on any one celebrity, she expects her readers will do plenty of online research. “I consider my readers these days to be like cyborgs, half person half internet,” she jokes. “They kind of add to whatever you write with this mass of Google.”

Much of Swing Time is set in Africa, and she says this reflects how “the impulse of the book was about blackness and West Africa was a natural part of that”. Her mixed-race narrator is dismayed to discover, late in the day, that she is considered white by the Africans she has come to know, and Smith says she had a similar experience while travelling to the continent from which her ancestors came.

Sounding thoroughly amused, she says her identity is misread “wherever I go”. “If I’m in Morocco they think I’m Moroccan. If I’m in the Arab world they think I’m an Arab. I’ve been mistaken for Pakistani. It’s an ongoing theme of my life. It didn’t surprise me [in Africa], but it was the first time I was mistaken for white. It’s so funny that when you’re in America and in this kind of binary — in which I am absolutely black and probably blacker than I am anywhere else — and when you’re in West Africa, at least in the parts I visited, I was an outlier.”

Now a tenured professor of fiction at New York University, she has been teaching and writing in the US on and off for a decade. She lives with her husband, Irish poet and novelist Nick Laird, and their two children in well-heeled Greenwich Village, and says that apart from those periods of intense publicity when she publishes a novel, her life is mostly anonymous. Writing, she says, “is not like recording music or acting. You’re just in the library, for days, years, and it’s quite easy to forget even that you’re published.” Yet when off duty she moves in rarefied circles, at least some of the time. Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides wrote recently that Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Lena Dunham are among the big names who have attended her drinks parties.

She is hoping to tour Australia next year, though like any working parent of young children she will need to sort out childcare for Harvey, 3, and Kit, 8, before she confirms. She admits there are times when coping with teaching, writing and kids can be a challenge. In fact, while completing Swing Time, “I did begin to lose my mind a little bit. But now the book is finished, so it’s fine, you know, it’s wonderful.”

Her previous novel, NW, also set in London, and also a saga of friends who end up on divergent paths, has been made into a television film that will screen in Britain on Monday. “I didn’t have anything to do with it but I saw it and I liked it,” says the author. “They did a great job. I was writing, so I just said yes [to an adaptation] and let them get on with it.” She is writing “a few [screen] adaptations and some new stuff” with Laird, but nothing is yet set in concrete. “Who knows? It’ll probably never go anywhere,” she murmurs. (It’s a relief to know she hasn’t adopted the American habit of relentlessly talking up everything she does.)

Is she working on another novel? “No. God no,” she replies with sudden firmness. “I do have loads of friends who finish [a book] and the next day they start something new. I can’t do that. I’m so relieved to finish a work that I like to have a big gap and do other things; smaller things. I’m enjoying my freedom.”

As well as writing highly regarded novels, Smith is an accomplished essayist. In August, in The New York Review of Books, she reflected on Brexit and how the shock referendum result exposed class, racial and economic fault lines running through Britain alongside the obvious division between regional working-class voters and the wealthier, cosmopolitan south. She didn’t spare her own group of progressive London intellectuals. “Wealthy London,” she argued, “whether red or blue, has always been able to pick and choose the nature of its multicultural and cross-class relations, to lecture the rest of the country on its narrow-mindedness while simultaneously fencing off its own discreet advantages.”

Self-reflexive and wise, her essay also speaks to the factors that underlie Donald Trump’s upset victory, which was confirmed just hours after we spoke about Brexit. Despite this, she insists: “I don’t like to pronounce on England. I didn’t like to pronounce on it even when I lived there, let alone when I don’t live there. I’m just a citizen with the same kind of bewilderment right now as everybody else.”

Swing Time by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton, $32.99) is released next week.

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