Book review: Changing my mind - Occasional essays

Published on Saturday 14 November 2009 13:56

CHANGING MY MIND: OCCASIONAL ESSAYS

Zadie Smith

Hamish Hamilton, 20

ALTHOUGH this collection of essays by Zadie Smith, one of the brightest and smartest contemporary British writers, is by turns incisive, poignant, mordant and beguiling, one overwhelming feature knits the disparate pieces together. Zadie Smith, it turns out, is a bit of a worrier. There is an oddly fretful and anxious tone, from the knowing-wink epigraph ("The time to make your mind up about people is never!" – "The Philadelphia Story") to the apology in the foreword, where she confesses she intended to write a "solemn, theoretical book about writing: Fail Better".

The first essay, an introduction to the still insufficiently appreciated Zora Neale Hurston, is framed by a scolding meted out to the younger Zadie Smith by her older self for her original, petulant reluctance to read Their Eyes Were Watching God. The last essay, a bravura defence of the late lamented David Foster Wallace, where Smith shows that as a critical reader she is stunningly perceptive, is shot through with concern about being thought pretentious, arcane or, heaven forfend, postmodern.

Why so worried? There is a fault-line running beneath these essays, the old problem about The Future Of The Novel. When she writes about "Rereading Barthes and Nabokov" or analyses the work of Tom McCarthy and Joseph O'Neill, in "Two Directions for the Novel", it is at its most conspicuous. On one hand, there is the experimental, avant-garde tradition; on the other, the more conservative variety that demonstrates "the transcendent importance of form, the incantatory power of language to reveal truth, the essential fullness and continuity of the self" – a style that Smith dubs "lyrical realism". It's an interesting coining, particularly since the first major critique of modern, radical novels called them "hysterical realists". The critic in question was James Wood, and his essay made more than one glancing hit at the work of Zadie Smith.

Part of the uneasiness in some of these essays stems from Smith trying to advocate simultaneously Wood's praise of "lifelikeness" while supporting the linguistic hi-jinks and verbal pirouettes of the writers nuanced by literary theory. If it is sometimes an uncomfortable compromise, at least it displays a level of genuine, confused sincerity. These are matters of taste, not Mosaic commandments. I just hope that worrying about writing doesn't hinder Smith's writing: there are times when these almost theological disputations are best left to the critics.

Smith writes more confidently and contentiously when literature is the background. A section on film includes reviews she did during 2006, and she is a very good film critic. They are pugnacious, wry and intellectually brisk pieces. She can be hilariously damning – she unpicks Memoirs Of A Geisha with delicious precision; is brusque and bemused by Date Movie and admits that, despite everything ridiculous and inept about it, she loved V For Vendetta. A piece of reportage on the Oscars is amusing in a light-hearted way, but is ultimately as inconsequential as the inconsequentiality she deftly sketches.

Two essays about her late father are exceptional, although of the two, I found her meditation on her father's love of particular British comedies more affecting and revealing than the more conventional discussion of his war record. Neither piece is at all sentimental, but in the conversations she and her father had about Basil Fawlty (did he fail his Eleven Plus?) there is a humane and empathetic quality. The "laugh or you'll cry" kind of comedy seems to unlock a little of Smith's own practice as a novelist. Both White Teeth and The Autograph Man had that manic, melancholic streak – a tradition in the English novel that goes back as far as Fielding and Sterne.

On Beauty, Smith's third novel, was less capacious and signalled its debts to EM Forster (a fine example of a mild lyrical realist) a little too self-consciously. It's not surprising, then, that Forster is the subject of an essay here, dealing with his BBC broadcasts. There are lines in this essay – and Smith, as a good theorist, knows that words will always give away more than the writer suspects – that apply to her own critical dilemma. When does "empathy become equivocation"? Who exactly is being addressed when she writes "Here's the funny thing about literary criticism: it hates its own times, only realising their worth 20 years later"?

Changing My Mind is belles-lettres in the best sense: engaging, questioning, subtly cajoling the reader into re-reading. She's a personable guide, even when the "critic wars" make her judgments jittery. The elegy for Foster Wallace is worth the cover price in itself, and left me wishing that she nailed her colours to the mast more often, instead of trying to be all things to all critics.

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 15/11/09