This spirit appears born not of a fear of confrontation but a genuine perplexity (of a searching, brilliant kind) at the nature of experience and people, including herself. “Death comes to all - but in America it has long been considered reasonable to offer the best chance of delay to the highest bidder.”Īt her most withering, on the subject of race, she writes about the many, “even in the bluest states in America,” who “are very happy to ‘blackout’ their social media for a day, to read all-Black books and ‘educate’ themselves about Black issues - as long as this education does not occur in the form of actual Black children attending their actual schools.”īut despite these jabs, Smith remains unmistakably noncombative. “The virus map of the New York boroughs turns redder along precisely the same lines as it would if the relative shade of crimson counted not infection and death but income brackets and middle-school ratings,” she writes. In “Intimations,” she speaks clearly and forcefully about the murder of George Floyd and the legacy of slavery and the systemic sins revealed by Covid-19. This cast of mind doesn’t mean that Smith avoids moral stances.
“Intimations,” her slender new collection (less than 100 pages) of ultra-timely essays (several written in the past few momentous months), showcases her trademark levelheadedness. In the very brief foreword to her first book of essays, “Changing My Mind,” she wrote: “Ideological inconsistency is, for me, practically an article of faith.” That faith doesn’t seem to have wavered in the 10 years since that book was published. But “polemic” is too generous a word for the dominant cultural tone.Īll of which makes Smith feel especially out of time. And maybe that’s fine maybe some times are just for fighting ideological fire with ideological fire. We’re in the Age of Certainty, at least in the bellowing of its various constituents. It’s never a boom time for wisdom - almost by definition if it were more common, it wouldn’t be valued so highly - but this is an especially arid era for it.
But, being subject to the space-time continuum, Smith is in her mid-40s now, and has the temperament and perspective of someone who could be (a compliment, in this case) 105.
Zadie Smith’s presence will always carry a significant memory of the 24-year-old who published “White Teeth” to international acclaim. Wunderkinds, even those who deservedly stick around a long time, don’t seem to age normally.
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