Review | Zadie Smith on fine form with fittingly titled Swing Time
Novelist taps her inimitable world view for another epic yet accessible work that traverses time and space, narrated in a voice more laid-back than in her earlier books
by Zadie Smith
Hamish Hamilton
One of the central characters in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time is Aimee. A deadish ringer for Kylie Minogue (with a dash, perhaps, of Madonna), she’s a world-famous pop star from Australia, not that you’d know this on first hearing. “She did not have an Australian accent, not anymore, but neither was it quite American or quite British, it was global: it was New York and Paris and Moscow and LA and London combined.”
One could say something similar about Zadie Smith’s body of work. She famously took the literary world by storm with her funny, larger-than-life debut, White Teeth (2000), which was set in London but felt (to use her own word) essentially global. Bangladeshi, Jamaican, Jewish and Anglo-Saxon characters fell in and out of love with award-winning brio.
The follow-up added further voices through a hero, Alex-Li Tandem, who was British-Jewish-Chinese. On Beauty (2005) transported Smith’s work, like Smith herself, to America, before her next novel, the messy, unsatisfying NW (2012), returned her home (whatever that means in this instance) to Willesden, in northwest London.
In this context, the title of Swing Time feels unusually grounded, an explicit allusion to George Stevens’ 1936 musical starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. What proves rather more complicated is the evolving response of Smith’s unnamed narrator. Her unabashed adoration of the film as a child is undermined years later when she realises that Astaire dances one famous scene (with his own three exhausted shadows) in blackface: “I’d managed to block the childhood image from my memory: the rolling eyes, the white gloves, the Bojangles grin. I felt very stupid, closed the laptop and went to sleep.”