First things first - I finished Swing Time last night and spent a few minutes browsing for worthwhile takes on it, and came across this passage (here), which is delightful in how it captures my own feelings about Zadie Smith (most recently attempted here).
There is also a sense that we must protect her: we feel her anxiety in her movement among styles, and we sense that she is trying to say the right good thing, and as she holds out her hand, we grip it and carry her on. I am invested in Zadie’s story, susceptible to the Bildung in all this: White Teeth came out the year I went up to Oxford, and became a symbol of all that a nerdy girl from a state school might do under meritocracy; The Autograph Man was given to me by my mother when I was on my year abroad in Paris, and reminded me of the importance of going beyond oneself even at the price of failure; On Beauty appeared the year I came to London and began working for the LRB, and I bought it in hardback and discussed it at a book group and even stole a placard of its very pretty cover from a Booker Prize party I snuck into; NW I read in a proof passed around the LRB office, and I tried out my thoughts on her experimental turn with colleagues in the same tentative way that she played with numbered paragraphs and their juxtaposition. This is just my story, but others of my generation have similar ones, and it’s a problem: we want her to pay back our emotional investment. With each new novel, the hope rises: is this finally the great book that was always coming?And Swing Time itself? Well, it's (still) not her great novel and indeed is a notch below NW I think, though it has many merits. It's in the first person, very controlled, many commas, no strong sense of the narrator's personality (which is partly the point - she is always in the shadow of others). Smith's craft as a writer only gets better each time at the plate, and her restlessness in continuing to seek out new formal ways of exploring the ideas that have been with her from the beginning - identity, race, connection, meaning, humanity, the stories we tell to become ourselves - is wonderful. Yet, still, I didn't feel fully taken hold of, shaken, by Swing Time. It is fine, very fine even, but that fire within really great fiction, it's not there.
