The Long View of Zadie Smith

Adam Kirsch's very thoughtful essay on Zadie Smith's work in The New Republic not only reminds me that I still desperately want to get my hands on her new essay collection, but it provokes me to drop everything I'm reading and dig up her novels.

Kirsch brings what I crave in literary criticism: a long view. He is not paraphrasing a title or two, or merely generalizing on a thin "trend" or tendency that he sees in her work. He has an empathetic and deep engagement with Smith's project as a writer. He draws on context with British literature. He is attentive to both comedy and contradiction (intentional and otherwise) in Smith's writing, which, for this much-discussed writer, seem to me to get insufficient attention. And, perhaps most notably, Kirsch approaches the writer in a way that acknowledges her capacity for change and evolution, rather than abusing the old reviewer trick of pinioning an author down as simply being one thing, or another. Perhaps the title of Smith's essay collection, Changing My Mind, made this approach inevitable, but it is at the same time refreshing.

And even as I am inclined dissent somewhat from some of Kirsch's ideas in this essay--in his comparison of Smith's essays with her fiction, he suggests that some of her critiques are "willfully obtuse;" I'll have to read more myself to be convinced -- Kirsch has done a literary critic's good work here.

One of the more interesting elements in the essay, titled "Against Beauty:"

White Teeth was published in 2000, and it is intriguing to wonder what might have happened if it had been delayed by a year. After September 11, 2001, it would not have been as easy to write, or to read, a novel in which KEVIN is the face of Islamic terrorism. In fact, all the troubles that White Teeth asks us to see as things of the past, from immigration to imperialism, began in the last decade to look like the stuff of our future. The past is not only prologue, the past is also present, and White Teeth often reads like a memento of the West’s brief decade of post-historical optimism.

Thanks to Chris M. for the link.

Comments

[Jérôme POINSOT]

Unfortunately, I cannot agree with you about the quality of Adam Kirsch's article.

How can critics can be believed when, obviously, ciritics is incapable to understand what is written ?

For example, Howard is not "against beauty", as writes Adam Kirsch's : his mind is only incompatible with beauty, what is a problem for a professor of aesthetic !
The second misinterpretation he makes is to think that Howard's career and life collapse, at the end of the novel, whereas he is coming back to life !!!

The following of his article looses quite credibility !

I'm afraid that Adam Kirsch would rather change of job for not have seen such évidences...

JP