Zadie Smith: Swing Time

“Swing Time” (2016) is a novel by Zadie Smith about two mixed-race girls who grow up in lower-middle-class London in the 1980s. One dreams of becoming a dancer, the other dreams of – nothing. But finds herself starting a girls’ school in West Africa on behalf of a Australian rock star.

I was disappointed: I had heard good things about Zadie Smith and liked some of her essays. Maybe it went over my head. Maybe it will grow on me. It had a surprise, tear-jerker ending and some good characters and scenes, but in the end it did not add up to much.

A good book, like travel, makes you see the world differently. This one did not. The main character herself travels the world, with a rock star, and goes to West Africa. But all of it seems to have little effect on her. It is almost as if she had never left her desk in London.

In most stories the hero wants something. Dorothy and Odysseus want to go home. Kunta Kinte wants to be free. Ariel in “The Little Mermaid” wants to become a real girl. Jane Austen’s heroines want to be happily married. The main character of this book seems to want nothing.

In this book the hero just drifts through life. Her best friend wants to be a dancer. Her mother wants to be elected to parliament. Her employer, a rock star, wants to start a school for girls in the Gambia. They all go after their dreams. Meanwhile she does not have even ordinary ambitions, like wanting a boyfriend or children or a career or just more money. She is a spectator to her own life.

We do not even know her name – she neither gives it nor does anyone call her by it.

Like Afua Hirsch in “Brit(ish)” (2018), which I am reading now, the narrator grew up mixed-race in London and went to West Africa. But whereas Hirsch is full of insights about race, identity and history, Zadie Smith’s main character seems to have few insights on those subjects. It is almost as if a White person wrote her book. Well, not quite: unlike Graham Greene in “The Heart of the Matter” (1948), at least she sees Africans as real people.

The best scene was when her best friend called a fellow Brown person a racial slur (“Paki”) at a tenth birthday party full of White girls. When her mother, who is Black, came to take them home:

“The moment we were outside, though, all her fury was for us, only for us, she pulled us like two bags of rubbish back down the road, shouting: ‘You think you’re one of them? Is that what you think?’ I remember exactly the sensation of being dragged along, my toes tracing the pavement, and how completely perplexed I was by the tears in my mother’s eyes, the distortion spoiling her handsome face. I remember everything about Lily Bingham’s tenth birthday and have no memory whatsoever of my own.”

– Abagond, 2020.

See also:

• books
  • Books I read in 2019
  • Afua Hirsch: Brit(ish)
  • Graham Greene: The Heart of the Matter
• Zadie Smith
  • Zadie Smith on writing
  • Zadie Smith: Speaking in Tongues
  • The British through time: the last 10,000 years
• Programming note #40 – this book was part of my British media diet in December 2019
• Real People
• mixed race
  • growing up biracial (the black-and-white kind)
  • mixed-ish

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