Last year the prolific and gifted Zadie Smith stumbled into controversy with the publication of \u201cShibboleth\u201d in the New Yorker. She purportedly approached the white-hot Gaza demonstrations with the nuance and complexity they deserved and yet derided pro-Palestinian students at Columbia University as \u201ccynical and unworthy,\u201d stirring up a hornets\u2019 nest among her young fans, who expressed their anger on various internet platforms. The controversy gained traction because of Smith\u2019s record of championing the marginalized, citing theorists like Frantz Fanon while targeting empires and the omnipresent patriarchy. That she singled out one group of activists, many Jewish, at the very moment Arab toddlers were being blown apart by U.S.-funded bombs raised doubts about her touted values. Her conclusion was startling, her tone defiant: \u201cPut me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, na\u00efve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward.\u201d The lady doth protest too much?<\/p>\n
\u201cShibboleth\u201d appears in \u201cDead and Alive,\u201d Smith\u2019s collection of previously published essays, in which she assumes most if not all those roles she attributes to herself. Fanon is here as well, amid an array of artists and authors such as Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth. Smith is arguing for the necessity of vigorous criticism and often makes her case. The book\u2019s finest pieces wrangle, in elegant prose, with humanity\u2019s contradictions; the weaker ones indulge in name-dropping, footnotes and op-ed invective.<\/p>\n
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Zadie Smith<\/p>\n
(Ben Bailey-Smith)<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Muse at Her Easel,\u201d in the opening section, probes the relationship between English painter Lucian Freud and his model, Celia Paul, also a painter, via a review of her memoir. (Paul is the mother of one of 12 children he fathered outside of marriage.) Smith\u2019s sly trick here is a bit of Freud-play: Lucian seen through the prism of his grandfather Sigmund, the family romance on steroids. Celia revolves around the artist here much as she did when he was alive, vulnerable and reflective, a moon to his sun. It\u2019s both a restrained and overwrought essay, a cryptic tale of sexual politics, like her fellow Brit Rachel Cusk\u2019s novel, \u201cSecond Place,\u201d but one that urges us to think hard about abuses in the service of \u201cmuseography.\u201d<\/p>\n
Smith brings an empathic eye to other artists, from the allegorical Toyin Ojih Odutola to the subversive Kara Walker. And she shines a bright light on numerous writers who have inspired her, particularly in remembrances of Didion (whose influence we sense throughout \u201cDead and Alive\u201d) and the great Hilary Mantel. Her pieces on two books, \u201cBlack England\u201d and \u201cBlack Manhattan,\u201d excavate hidden histories of Black resistance and the painful compromises brokered to move forward. Her tone in \u201cFascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction\u201d is elegiac, as though smartphones have killed off the craft; yet it\u2019s also a manifesto of sorts, and a declaration of her own aesthetics. \u201cBelief in a novel is, for me, a by-product of a certain kind of sentence,\u201d Smith observes. \u201cFamiliarity, kinship, and compassion will play their part, but if the sentences don\u2019t speak to me, nothing else will.\u201d Amen, sister.<\/p>\n
Her forays into social commentary are more problematic. She\u2019s strong on the weird population kink known as Gen X, squeezed between the larger boomers and millennials, and the switchback road we traveled to marriage and parenthood: \u201cWe all still dressed like teenagers, though, and in the minds of the popular culture were \u2018slackers,\u2019 suffering from some form of delayed development, possibly the sad consequences of missing such key adulting experiences as a good war or a stock market crash,\u201d Smith asserts. \u201cWe felt history belonged to other people: that we lived in the time of no time.\u201d She\u2019s persuasive when she remains within her comfort zone, opining on race, gender and, occasionally, class. Not so much when she ventures into technology. In \u201cSome Notes on Mediated Time,\u201d she broods at length on the destabilizing effects of the internet, social media and the algorithm silos that shape our present. It\u2019s tough to parse irony from self-congratulation. \u201cI have to say how immensely grateful I am that the work I have been so fortunate to do these last twenty years \u2014 writing books \u2014 has also gifted me the opportunity, the privilege, of devoting the time of my one human life to an algorithm. To keep almost all of it, selfishly, outrageously, for myself, my friends, my colleagues, my family,\u201d Smith writes. \u201cThere are memes I will never know. Whole Twitter meltdowns I never witnessed. Hashtags I will forever remain ignorant about.\u201d Which raises the question: Why lament a social paradigm shift if you haven\u2019t bothered with it in the first place? Something isn\u2019t right. Elsewhere in the essay she claims that social media is \u201cexcellent for building brands and businesses and attracting customers.\u201d Could the same be said of a disingenuous essayist?<\/p>\n
She comes across as preaching to her peers rather than seeking converts, a whiff of Oxbridge elitism. Hence references to Derrida, Dickinson, Knausgaard, Borges, shout-outs to Booker laureates \u201cSalman\u201d (Rushdie) and \u201cIan\u201d (McEwan). This level of self-regard in a writer and thinker as justifiably exalted as Smith may explain why our nation is turning on reading: aristocracies breed resentment among the proles. Then Smith steps into the muck of global conflicts. The moral bothsidesism found in \u201cShibboleth\u201d splits the baby; she does herself no favors with Solomonic pronouncements and Pontius Pilate-like self-exoneration. (Elsewhere she indicts Trump and Netanyahu while neglecting the money and media that empower them.)<\/p>\n
\u201cDead and Alive\u201d does what it was designed to do: It gathers the author\u2019s criticism, literary obituaries, a university address and an interview with a Spanish journal between two covers. The execution falters. Smith\u2019s provocations are often stunning; her prose is thrillingly strident; but her fiction better captures the messiness of public and private selves at war with each other.<\/p>\n
Cain is a book critic and the author of a memoir, \u201cThis Boy\u2019s Faith: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing.\u201d He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Book Review Dead and Alive: Essays By Zadie Smith Penguin Press: 352 pages, $30 If you buy books…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102123,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[45848,3257,5800,422,67316,7391,25175,67320,42,67317,43,67318,1529,44363,8838,762,40,38,41,39,67319],"class_list":["post-102122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-alive","tag-artist","tag-author","tag-book","tag-celia-paul","tag-controversy","tag-essay","tag-family-romance","tag-headlines","tag-joan-didion","tag-news","tag-numerous-writer","tag-review","tag-sentence","tag-smith","tag-time","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-vigorous-criticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102122\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}