FICTION IN REVIEW

Abstract

1 5 4 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W M A R T A F I G L E R O W I C Z ‘‘It was the first day of my humiliation.’’ When Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016) begins, its protagonist-narrator brims with hurt and shame. She has inflicted pain on, and been brutally rejected by, someone she loved. To make things worse, their miscommunications are out in public for everyone to see. What will happen now, she asks herself, as she hesitantly checks her email. In place of an answer, the server yields a hateful, anonymous note that she instantly recognizes as coming from another estranged intimate. ‘‘The body of the message,’’ she tells us, ‘‘was a single sentence: Now everyone knows who you really are.’’ In essays and interviews, Smith derives her writing from a strand of high modernism whose main proponent was E. M. Forster . It is the modernism of what Forster called ‘‘muddled’’ lives: of Zelda rather than F. Scott Fitzgerald, of Catherine Mansfield and Charlotte Perkins Gilman rather than Ernest Hemingway or D. H. Lawrence. With these earlier writers, Smith shares an aesthetic and a√ective intensity that the literary critic James Wood has S w i n g T i m e , by Zadie Smith (Penguin, 464 pp., $27) 1 5 5 R ungenerously described as hysteria. She also continues these marginal modernists’ critique of a√ectively contained, manicured art as inaccurate for the messy ways human relationships actually work. Smith is an artist of the meltdown. She pursues epiphanies that come not after a long walk by the ocean but after catching a glimpse of oneself in the eyes of others as one is crying in public: ‘‘This being Manhattan, nobody paused to watch what must have looked like a staged reenactment: a weeping woman, sat on a step, under that Lazarus plaque, huddled by boxes, far from home.’’ The interpersonal dramas from which these embarrassing epiphanies issue tend to be what the Marxist literary critic Franco Moretti calls middle-class crimes: betrayals of mutual intimacies and agreements that the law does not directly proscribe, but that are not thereby any less devastating to those a√ected by them. Her protagonists reel from the relationships they lose during such crises but also from their own confusing incapacity to articulate these relationships’ exact terms or measure the degree of guilt and resentment they ought to feel about their dissolution. Such ine√able bonds, clarified to their bearers only in moments of abandon or disappointment, have long been the subject of Smith’s writing. She explores them through the unexpectedly deep friendships and shaky marriages of White Teeth’s Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal (2000); through Alex-Li Tandem’s earnest, selfless obsessions with stardom in The Autograph Man (2002); through the heady intellectual and a√ective exchanges of On Beauty (2005) and the more sordid marital betrayals of NW (2012). She also names them as her personal and aesthetic obsessions in the essays collected in Changing My Mind (2010). Like Smith’s earlier novels, Swing Time depicts fluctuating, long-term bonds for which her characters cannot find appropriate names or rules. It also explores how these confusions are multiplied by incompatibilities or liminalities of race, gender, and class. Compared to these earlier novels, however, Swing Time is much darker and more polemical. It is animated by a fascination with the blurring of a√ective and social categories, as well as by a sharp indictment – which White Teeth or even On Beauty still curtailed, or blunted with humor – of more individualized notions of selfcontrol and self-fulfillment. Swing Time is told from the perspective of an unnamed thirty- 1 5 6 F I G L E R O W I C Z Y something female narrator who grows up in a working-class neighborhood of London with her white father and Jamaican mother. Her best friend until young adulthood is another biracial girl named Tracey, who is raised by a single mom and occasionally visited by an absentee dad. Both girls attend dance classes as children, and...