Flattening the curse: Cooling down with Zadie Smith’s Intimations

Abstract

ABSTRACT Zadie Smith’s latest collection of non-fiction, Intimations (2020), walks her readers through the burning blaze of the pandemic with what this article calls “cooling down”. Embracing both aesthetics and affect, the concept of cooling down is not new to Smith’s oeuvre. Indeed, its signature characteristics that include a calm authorial voice, controlled pace of prose, a self-aware narrator, and an insistence on reflection appear in all of Smith’s work, including novels such as White Teeth (2000) and Swing Time (2017) and non-fiction, such as Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2010) and Feel Free (2019). This article examines narrative structure, affective appeal, and political commentary as the three cooling-down registers deployed in the “pandemic” essays of Intimations. Reading against the organizational grain of the collection, the article is organized by discussing them out of sequence to emphasize an alternative juxtaposition that renders Smith’s intervention through form, affect, and/or politics most accessible.