Review | From Jay-Z to Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith’s second non-fiction outing is a mixed bag of essays

Feel Free
by Zadie Smith
Penguin

Zadie Smith is arguably Britain’s hottest literary writer. Her novels, from White Teeth (2000) to Swing Time (2016), have won wide acclaim and she has received nearly every accolade an author can enjoy.

Smith is also an accomplished essayist. A previous collection, Changing My Mind (2009), displayed a talent for non-fiction, and she has followed that up with Feel Free, a selection of her reviews, essays, reflections and more from the years since.

Smith is a sharp commentator on issues related to race. With race relations perhaps less fraught in Britain than in the United States (class argu­ably being the supreme British social barrier), Smith has been able to capture the experiences and perspectives of a wide variety of characters in her work without offending the sensibilities of Middle England.

This is a neat balancing act and Smith’s veneration of literature is perhaps key. She adores reading, writing and books; she loves Philip Roth, J.G. Ballard, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, poetry, rappers and essays. This enthusiasm might also explain a certain critical overpraising of her abilities – one reviewer called her a “prose wizard”, for example.