Among those who write for the desk drawer—students burning midnight oil on novels, poets trapped in salesmen's bodies, lawyers tinkering with screenplays—Zadie Smith is both an envy object and a kind of hero, plucked out of the world's slush pile to churn out three hefty, precocious books. But it turns out she has some desk-drawer accumulations of her own. "When I was growing up, I really admired academics," Smith has said. "I really wanted to be a critic. Critics think of themselves as secondary to artists. They needn't be." In fact, Smith's longest-standing project this decade—a thing she calls "a solemn, theoretical book about writing"—has yet to see the light of day. This fall instead brought her first collection of essays, culled mostly from newspapers and magazines. The collection is titled Changing My Mind, and Smith describes it in a foreword as being rife with "ideological inconsistency." What's striking, though, is how consistent the book actually is.
Nathan Heller's review of Zadie Smith's new book (a book that I covet) provokes the question "how should fiction be read?" in Slate.
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