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BY THE SAME AUTHOR
White Teeth
The Autograph Man
On Beauty
NW
The Embassy of Cambodia
Swing Time
NONFICTION
The Book of Other People (editor)
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays
PENGUIN PRESS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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New York, New York 10014
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Copyright © 2018 by Zadie Smith
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA AVAILABLE
ISBN: 9781594206252 (hc)
9780698178885 (e-book)
Version_1
For Kit and Hal
and
For Robert B. Silvers, in memoriam
“People can be slave-ships in shoes.”
—Zora Neale Hurston
“The eyes are not windows. There are nerve impulses, but no one reads them, counts them, translates them, and ruminates about them. Hunt for as long as you want, there’s nobody home. The world is contained within you, and you’re not there.”
—Daniel Kehlmann
CONTENTS
By the Same Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword
PART I: IN THE WORLD
Northwest London Blues
Elegy for a Country’s Seasons
Fences: A Brexit Diary
On Optimism and Despair
PART II: IN THE AUDIENCE
Generation Why?
The House That Hova Built
Brother from Another Mother
Some Notes on Attunement
Windows on the Will: Anomalisa
Dance Lessons for Writers
PART III: IN THE GALLERY
Killing Orson Welles at Midnight
Flaming June
“Crazy They Call Me”: On Looking at Jerry Dantzic’s Photos of Billie Holiday
Alte Frau by Balthasar Denner
Mark Bradford’s Niagara
A Bird of Few Words: Narrative Mysteries in the Paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
The Tattered Ruins of the Map: On Sarah Sze’s Centrifuge
Getting In and Out
PART IV: ON THE BOOKSHELF
Crash by J. G. Ballard
The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi
Notes on NW
The Harper’s Columns
The I Who Is Not Me
PART V: FEEL FREE
Life-Writing
The Bathroom
Man Versus Corpse
Meet Justin Bieber!
Love in the Gardens
The Shadow of Ideas
Find Your Beach
Joy
Afterword
Picture Credits
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
FOREWORD
I was having dinner with old friends in Rome when one of them turned to me and said: “But of course your writing so far has been a fifteen-year psychodrama.” Everybody laughed—so did I—but I was a little stung by it, and worried at the idea for a few weeks. Now here I am bringing it up in this foreword. It’s true that for years I’ve been thinking aloud—and often wondering if I’ve made myself ludicrous in one way or another. I think the anxiety comes from knowing I have no real qualifications to write as I do. Not a philosopher or sociologist, not a real professor of literature or film, not a political scientist, professional music critic or trained journalist. I’m employed in an MFA program, but have no MFA myself, and no PhD. My evidence—such as it is—is almost always intimate. I feel this—do you? I’m struck by this thought—are you? Essays about one person’s affective experience have, by their very nature, not a leg to stand on. All they have is their freedom. And the reader is likewise unusually free, because I have absolutely nothing over her, no authority. She can reject my feelings at every point, she can say: “No, I have never felt that” or “Dear Lord, the thought never crossed my mind!”
Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self. The first is never wholly mine; the second I can only ever know in a partial sense; the third is a malleable and improvised response to the previous two. If my writing is a psychodrama I don’t think it is because I have, as the internet would have it, so many feels, but because the correct balance and weight to be given to each of these three elements is never self-evident to me. It’s this self—whose boundaries are uncertain, whose language is never pure, whose world is in no way “self-evident”—that I try to write from and to. My hope is for a reader who, like the author, often wonders how free she really is, and who takes it for granted that reading involves all the same liberties and exigencies as writing.
• • •
A note: I realize my somewhat ambivalent view of human selves is wholly out of fashion. These essays you have in your hands were written in England and America during the eight years of the Obama presidency and so are the product of a bygone world. It is of course hardly possible to retain any feelings of ambivalence—on either side of the Atlantic—in the face of what we now confront. Millions of more or less amorphous selves will now necessarily find themselves solidifying into protesters, activists, marchers, voters, firebrands, impeachers, lobbyists, soldiers, champions, defenders, historians, experts, critics. You can’t fight fire with air. But equally you can’t fight for a freedom you’ve forgotten how to identify. To the reader still curious about freedom I offer these essays—to be used, changed, dismantled, destroyed or ignored as necessary!
Zadie Smith
New York
January 18, 2017
IN THE WORLD
NORTHWEST LONDON BLUES
Last time I was in Willesden Green I took my daughter to visit my mother. The sun was out. We wandered down Brondesbury Park toward the high road. The “French Market” was on, which is a slightly improbable market of French things sold in the concrete space between the pretty turreted remnants of Willesden Library (1894) and the brutal red-brick beached cruise ship known as Willesden Green Library Centre (1989), a substantial local landmark that racks up nearly five hundred thousand visits a year. We walked in the sun down the urban street to the concrete space—to market. This wasn’t like walking a shady country lane in a quaint market town ending up in a perfectly preserved eighteenth-century square. It was not even like going to one of these farmers’ markets that have sprung up all over London at the crossroads where personal wealth meets a strong interest in artisanal cheeses.
But it was still very nice. Willesden French Market sells cheap bags. It sells CDs of old-time jazz and rock and roll. It sells umbrellas and artificial flowers. It sells ornaments and knickknacks and doodahs, which are not always obviously French in theme or nature. It sells water pistols. It sells French breads and pastries for not much more than you’d pay for the baked goods in Greggs down Kilburn High Road. It sells cheese, but of the decently priced and e