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15 great essays by zadie smith, sweet charity, words and writing, speaking in tongues, the rise of the essay, that crafty feeling, dance lessons for writers by zadie smith, on killing charles dickens by zadie smith, sex and wheels by zadie smith, see also..., 150 great articles and essays.

The Secret History of Black England by Zadie Smith

Some notes on attunement by zadie smith, dead man laughing, you are in paradise, changing my mind.

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Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith — from the sublime to the showbiz

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Zadie Smith’s Book of Essays Explores What It Means to Be Human

The varieties of individuality in “feel free”.

“If I have any gift at all,” Zadie Smith admits in one of the essays in Feel Free , “it’s for dialogue—that trick of breathing what-looks-like-life into a collection of written sentences.” Smith does voices. Sometimes literally: an audio recording of her reading her story “Escape from New York,” includes the treat that is impressions of its three characters, Michael Jackson, Marlon Brando, and Elizabeth Taylor. Her fiction, of course, is full of voices, but the rendering of this familiar trio and their escape occupies that fertile gray area somewhere between entirely real and entirely fabricated. It isn’t mimicry, which leads nowhere, but a curious sort of imaginary impersonation, which leads everywhere.

Imaginary impersonation sounds like a purely fictional mode, yet it’s the way she approaches all writing, which brings together “three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self.” It is these three, she tells us in her introduction, that constitute writing “(for me)”. The parentheses are important because it’s the final category that’s the real kicker. Selfhood—other people’s—is what she returns to again and again, through what else but her own shifting and brilliant subjectivity. So it is that instead of a straight “introductory essay for a book of Billie Holiday photos,” Smith writes a bravura monologue, a virtuosic act of ventriloquism. Tellingly, it’s in the second person: Zadie-as-Billie-as-“you”.

In fact—though many aren’t hip to this yet—not only is there no more Eleanora, there isn’t any Billie either. There is only Lady Day. Alligator bag, three rows of diamonds nice and thick on your wrist—never mind that it’s three o’ clock in the afternoon. You boil an egg in twinset and pearls.

“I did try to write an essay about Billie,” Smith admits in a glum little shrug of a footnote, “but every angle seemed too formal or cold.” When your subject presents herself to you with the intimacy of a first name, and when that “you” identifies as a “sentimental humanist” it would only be a travesty to respond with the detachment of cool appraisal.

Smith’s great fascination with selfhood rests in its contingency. In an essay on the artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye , who paints anonymous, elegant black figures, Smith quotes the painter Chris Ofili. Responding to the intimacy of the paintings, Ofili had marveled at, “the tightness of her bun. The size of his ear. She knew so much about so little about him. She said so little he heard so much.” “Exactly,” Smith enthuses, taking up where Ofili left off. “Here are some paintings of he and she, him and her. They say little, explicitly, but you hear so much.” Ofili, in these elliptical sentences, leaps from small, specific and personal details, to some felt, relational truth, and this is very much Smith’s mode as both fiction writer and critic.

Noting the New Museum show’s red walls, a color that strikes her as being redolent of “the calico covers of nineteenth-century novels,” Smith proposes that the color “has the effect of bringing a diverse selection of souls together, framing and containing them, much like a novel contains its people, which is to say, only partially.” It’s this partial containment, the generosity it grants, that appears to yield this next impression. The paintings “seem to have souls—that ultimate retrogressive term!—though by “soul” we need to imply nothing more metaphysical here than the sum total of one person’s affect in the mind of another.”

This definition of soul, “one person’s affect in the mind of another” resonates throughout the collection, and finds full expression when Smith considers Justin Bieber in relation to the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. “Meet Justin Bieber!” is a very funny essay but it it also, and this is the quiet miracle of it, wholly intellectually sound. Bieber, as Smith puts it with benign provocation, “is still not yet a person,” since (quoting Buber) “Individuality makes its appearance by being differentiated from other individualities.” Bieber, the globally famous love object, “meets only those who feel they have already met him, and already love him.” Unlike, say, an encounter between Bieber and one of his fans at a corporate meet-and-greet in a stadium, this imaginary meeting between Bieber and Buber in Smith’s essay means something. It aspires, in fact, toward Buber’s own definition of meeting, which Smith renders as, “an intimate, complex, and precious state, a state we achieve only rarely.”

Elsewhere, in an essay that discusses both Charlie Kaufman’s genius stop-motion film Anomalisa and Schopenhauer, Smith writes : “I waited in the dark for something not quite human—and all too human—to begin.” There is an artistic generosity to the category of “not quite human and all too human.” This is the territory of fiction: The three dead celebrities reanimated as versions of themselves in “Escape from New York” are not quite human and all too human. So is the persuasive reality of an anonymous, made-up woman’s bun in a painting. Likewise, the puppets in Anomalisa, with their arrestingly lifelike eyes yet visible seams are “mixture of artifice and realism”.

This, too, speaks to the notion of “The I Who Is Not Me”, the title of an essay on writing in the first person. 2016’s Swing Time marked a departure from the third person. There is a certain comfort in writing at one remove from characters, but there is also an implicit political imperative. Considering her third novel, 2005’s On Beauty, Smith writes: “This is the kind of fiction I have always loved to write and read: worming itself into many different bodies, many different lives. Fiction that faces outwards, toward others.” Fiction, in other words, that is generative, freeing, to both writer and reader. But writing in the first person offers an alternative version of freedom: “ It creates a space that allows for the writer’s experience and the reader’s simultaneously, a world in which Portnoy is at once entirely Philip Roth and not Philip Roth at all. That sounds like an impossible identity, but literature, for me, is precisely the ambivalent space in which impossible identities are made possible, both for their authors and their characters.”

It’s in impossible identities that we find freedom. And then comes a litany of names, first names whose surnames are implicit (as with “Billie” earlier), names that each conjure up many voices, their own voice and their characters’s voices and their literary antecedents,’ and then the overarching voice, the “voice” of their individuality: “I am Philip, I am Colson, I am Jonathan,” Smith announces, “I am Rivka, I am Virginia, I am Sylvia, I am Zora, I am Chinua, I am Saul, I am Toni, I am Nathan, I am Vladimir, I am Leo, I am Albert, I am Chimamanda.”

She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do. At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves. The philosophical experiment of “doing” all these other voices, comes from her own recognition of herself as a biracial British child of the 70s: “Not to take yourself as a natural, unquestionable entity,” she writes, “can lead you in turn to become aware of the radical contingency of life in general, its supremely accidental nature.” Who we are is, to a great degree, chance. We so easily could have been someone else. As one character says in White Teeth, “Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies.”

In her celebrated essay “Joy” , Smith writes that one source of daily pleasure for her is “other people’s faces”—their specificity, the irreducibly human individuality therein, nobody’s but their own. The subtlest joy of these essays is sensing Smith’s own personhood, a personhood inseparable from her intellectual life. The self encompasses both. After the bracing dynamics of so much thought, the essays in Feel Free leave the reader not with a succinct theory of metaphysical dialogue between a global pop phenomenon and twentieth-century philosopher, but rather an image: the endearing, enduring image of one of our finest public intellectuals bickering with her husband, in a car, as she hankers for a sausage roll.

Hermione Hoby is the author of the novels Virtue and Neon In Daylight.

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Changing My Mind : Occasional Essays

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Author Interviews

In essays, author zadie smith reveals her process.

Zadie Smith teaches fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts. Roderick Field hide caption

Zadie Smith teaches fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts.

Author Zadie Smith admits that early literary success is not always a blessing. She was 25 when she published her first novel, the widely praised White Teeth . Since then, she has written two other novels — On Beauty and The Autograph Man — but she has also experimented with literary criticism, movie reviews and political writing.

Now, she has compiled some of that work in the collection Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays .

Throughout the essays, Smith reveals a bit about her writing process. She reveals how she writes — and the people and literary works that have influenced her.

Smith says she spends 80 percent of her efforts on the first 50 or 60 pages of a book — and the rest comes "pretty quickly." She says she does that to get the tone — the perspective — the way she wants it.

Book Review

Reviewer Heller McAlpin calls Zadie Smith's essays about her father the "real payoff" of Changing My Mind . Read The Review.

"It's the hope that you might write something different — and then often the realization that you're writing something the same," Smith tells NPR's Michele Norris. "The beginning is so painful, the end is torturous, but in the middle you're writing a lot of words per day. You feel very productive, and you get carried away."

While she gets carried away midbook, Smith admits that she doesn't write every day.

"I wish I did more than anything, and I wish I had the compulsion," she says. "But in my defense, I think that novels should feel very necessary to the people who write them. I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury."

Two of Smith's essays focus on her father, who died in 2006. Smith says she wrote about her father as a way to mourn him. (Read one of the essays, " Dead Man Laughing ," below)

"I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person," she says. "And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.

"With my father, writing about him was genuinely an act of mourning. I didn't realize I'd be the person who used my writing in that way. I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I wanted to do."

Smith says her father was difficult to pin down, and she wanted to make him "more solid."

"I think maybe with the rest of my family, they're much larger than life. My father was a little bit more elusive," she says. But "it's also a betrayal once you write about someone who's died: What remains is what you've written. And it begins to replace your memories the way that photographs replace real things. So I think it's a dangerous act. I don't think I'd ever write a full memoir for that reason — it seems to over-slick reality with something else."

Changing My Mind

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Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction

October 24, 2019 issue

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I’ve always been aware of being an inconsistent personality. Of having a lot of contradictory voices knocking around my head. As a kid, I was ashamed of it. Other people seemed to feel strongly about themselves, to know exactly who they were. I was never like that. I could never shake the suspicion that everything about me was the consequence of a series of improbable accidents—not least of which was the 400 trillion–to-one accident of my birth. As I saw it, even my strongest feelings and convictions might easily be otherwise, had I been the child of the next family down the hall, or the child of another century, another country, another God. My mind wandered.

To give a concrete example: if the Pakistani girl next door happened to be painting mehndi on my hands—she liked to use me for practice—it was the work of a moment to imagine I was her sister. I’d envision living with Asma, and knowing and feeling the things she knew and felt. To tell the truth, I rarely entered a friend’s home without wondering what it might be like to never leave. That is, what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or hold those politics. I was an equal-opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody. Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe. Whenever I spent time with my pious Uncle Ricky, and the moment came for everyone around the table to bow their heads, close their eyes, and thank God for a plate of escovitch fish, I could all too easily convince myself that I, too, was a witness of Jehovah. I’d see myself leaving the island, arriving in freezing England, shivering and gripping my own mother’s hand, who was—in this peculiar fictional version—now my older sister.

I don’t claim I imagined any of this correctly—only compulsively. And what I did in life, I did with books. I lived in them and felt them live in me. I felt I was Jane Eyre and Celie and Mr. Biswas and David Copperfield. Our autobiographical coordinates rarely matched. I’d never had a friend die of consumption or been raped by my father or lived in Trinidad or the Deep South or the nineteenth century. But I’d been sad and lost, sometimes desperate, often confused. It was on the basis of such flimsy emotional clues that I found myself feeling with these imaginary strangers: feeling with them, for them, alongside them and through them, extrapolating from my own emotions, which, though strikingly minor when compared to the high dramas of fiction, still bore some relation to them, as all human feelings do. The voices of characters joined the ranks of all the other voices inside me, serving to make the idea of my “own voice” indistinct. Or maybe it’s better to say: I’ve never believed myself to have a voice entirely separate from the many voices I hear, read, and internalize every day.

At some point during this inconsistent childhood, I was struck by an old cartoon I came across somewhere. It depicted Charles Dickens, the image of contentment, surrounded by all his characters come to life. I found that image comforting. Dickens didn’t look worried or ashamed. Didn’t appear to suspect he might be schizophrenic or in some other way pathological. He had a name for his condition: novelist. Early in my life, this became my cover story, too. And for years now, in the pages of novels, “I” have been both adult and child, male and female, black, brown, and white, gay and straight, funny and tragic, liberal and conservative, religious and godless, not to mention alive and dead. All the voices within me have had an airing, and though I never achieved the sense of contentment I saw in that cartoon—itself perhaps a fiction—over time I have striven to feel less shame about my compulsive interest in the lives of others and the multiple voices in my head. Still, whenever I am struck by the old self-loathing, I try to bring to mind that cartoon, alongside some well-worn lines of Walt Whitman’s:

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I’m sure I’m not the first novelist to dig up that old Whitman chestnut in defense of our indefensible art. And it would be easy enough at this point to march onward and write a triumphalist defense of fiction, ridiculing those who hold the very practice in suspicion—the type of reader who wonders how a man wrote Anna Karenina , or why Zora Neale Hurston once wrote a book with no black people in it, or why a gay woman like Patricia Highsmith spent so much time imagining herself into the life of an (ostensibly) straight white man called Ripley. But I don’t write fiction in a triumphalist spirit and I can’t defend it in that way either. Besides which, a counter-voice in my head detects, in Whitman’s lines, not a little entitlement. Containing multitudes sounds, just now, like an act of colonization. Who is this Whitman, and who does he think he is, containing anyone? Let Whitman speak for Whitman—I’ll speak for myself, thank you very much. How can Whitman—white, gay, American—possibly contain, say, a black polysexual British girl or a nonbinary Palestinian or a Republican Baptist from Atlanta? How can Whitman, dead in 1892, contain, or even know anything at all of the particularities of any of us, alive as we are, in this tumultuous year, 2019?

This inner voice suspects the problem starts in that word, contain , which would appear to share some lexical territory with other troubling discourses. The language of land rights. The language of prison ideology. The language of immigration policy. Even the language of military strategy. Nor does it seem at all surprising to me that we should, in 2019, have this hypersensitivity to language, given that it is something we carry about our person, in our mouths and our minds. It’s right there, within our grasp, and we can effect change upon it, sometimes radical change. Whereas many more material issues—precisely economic inequality, criminal justice reform, immigration policy, and war—prove frighteningly intractable. Language becomes the convenient battlefield. And language is also, literally, the “containment.” The terms we choose—or the terms we are offered—behave as containers for our ideas, necessarily shaping and determining the form of what it is we think, or think we think. Our arguments about “cultural appropriation,” for example, cannot help but be heavily influenced by the term itself. Yet we treat those two carefully chosen words as if they were elemental, neutral in themselves, handed down from the heavens. When of course they are only, like all language, a verbal container, which, like all such containers, allows the emergence of certain ideas while limiting the possibilities of others.

What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if our preferred verbal container for the phenomenon of writing about others was not “cultural appropriation” but rather “interpersonal voyeurism” or “profound-other-fascination” or even “cross-epidermal reanimation”? Our discussions would still be vibrant, perhaps even still furious—but I’m certain they would not be the same. Aren’t we a little too passive in the face of inherited concepts? We allow them to think for us, and to stand as place markers when we can’t be bothered to think. What she said. But surely the task of a writer is to think for herself! And immediately, within that bumptious exclamation mark, an internal voice notes the telltale whiff of baby boomer triumphalism, of Generation X moral irresponsibility…. I do believe a writer’s task is to think for herself, although this task, to me, signifies not a fixed state but a continual process: thinking things afresh, each time, in each new situation. This requires not a little mental flexibility. No piety of the culture—whether it be I think therefore I am , To be or not to be , You do you , or I contain multitudes— should or ever can be entirely fixed in place or protected from the currents of history. There is always the potential for radical change.

“Re-examine all you have been told,” Whitman tells us, “and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.” Full disclosure: what insults my soul is the idea—popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity—that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally “like” us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally. That only an intimate authorial autobiographical connection with a character can be the rightful basis of a fiction. I do not believe that. I could not have written a single one of my books if I did. But I feel no sense of triumph in my apostasy. It might well be that we simply don’t want or need novels like mine anymore, or any of the kinds of fictions that, in order to exist, must fundamentally disagree with the new theory of “likeness.” It may be that the whole category of what we used to call fiction is becoming lost to us. And if enough people turn from the concept of fiction as it was once understood, then fighting this transformation will be like going to war against the neologism “impactful” or mourning the loss of the modal verb “shall.” As it is with language, so it goes with culture: what is not used or wanted dies. What is needed blooms and spreads.

Consequently, my interest here is not so much prescriptive as descriptive. For me the question is not: Should we abandon fiction? (Readers will decide that—are in the process of already deciding. Many decided some time ago.) The question is: Do we know what fiction was ? We think we know. In the process of turning from it, we’ve accused it of appropriation, colonization, delusion, vanity, naiveté, political and moral irresponsibility. We have found fiction wanting in myriad ways but rarely paused to wonder, or recall, what we once wanted from it—what theories of self-and-other it offered us, or why, for so long, those theories felt meaningful to so many. Embarrassed by the novel—and its mortifying habit of putting words into the mouths of others—many have moved swiftly on to what they perceive to be safer ground, namely, the supposedly unquestionable authenticity of personal experience.

The old—and never especially helpful—adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: Stay in your lane. This principle permits the category of fiction, but really only to the extent that we acknowledge and confess that personal experience is inviolate and nontransferable. It concedes that personal experience may be displayed, very carefully, to the unlike-us, to the stranger, even to the enemy—but insists it can never truly be shared by them. This rule also pertains in the opposite direction: the experience of the unlike-us can never be co-opted, ventriloquized, or otherwise “stolen” by us. (As the philosopher Anthony Appiah has noted, these ideas of cultural ownership share some DNA with the late-capitalist concept of brand integrity.) Only those who are like us are like us. Only those who are like us can understand us—or should even try. Which entire philosophical edifice depends on visibility and legibility, that is, on the sense that we can be certain of who is and isn’t “like us” simply by looking at them and/or listening to what they have to say.

Fiction didn’t believe any of that. Fiction suspected that there is far more to people than what they choose to make manifest. Fiction wondered what likeness between selves might even mean, given the profound mystery of consciousness itself, which so many other disciplines—most notably philosophy—have probed for millennia without reaching any definitive conclusions. Fiction was suspicious of any theory of the self that appeared to be largely founded on what can be seen with the human eye, that is, those parts of our selves that are material, manifest, and clearly visible in a crowd. Fiction—at least the kind that was any good—was full of doubt, self-doubt above all. It had grave doubts about the nature of the self.

Like a lot of writers I want to believe in fiction. But I’m simultaneously full of doubt, as is my professional habit. I know that the old Whitmanesque defense needs an overhaul. Containment—as a metaphor for the act of writing about others—is unequal to the times we live in. These times in which so many of us feel a collective, desperate, and justified desire to be once and for all free of the limited—and limiting—fantasies and projections of other people. With all due respect to Whitman, then, I’m going to relegate him to the bench, and call up, in defense of fiction, another nineteenth-century poet, Emily Dickinson:

I measure every Grief I meet With narrow, probing, eyes— I wonder if It weighs like Mine— Or has an Easier size.

This gets close to the experience of making up fictional people. It starts as a consciousness out in the world: looking, listening, noticing. A kind of awareness, attended by questions. What is it like to be that person? To feel what they feel? I wonder. Can I use what I feel to imagine what the other feels? A little later in the poem, Dickinson moves from the abstract to the precise:

There’s Grief of Want—and grief of Cold— A sort they call “Despair”— There’s Banishment from native Eyes— In sight of Native Air—

She makes a map in her mind of possibilities. But later, as the poem concludes, she concedes that no mental map can ever be perfect, although this does not mean that such maps have no purpose:

And though I may not guess the kind— Correctly—yet to me A piercing Comfort it affords In passing Calvary—

To note the fashions—of the Cross— And how they’re mostly worn— Still fascinated to presume That Some—are like my own—

In place of the potential hubris of containment, then, Dickinson offers us something else: the fascination of presumption. This presumption does not assume it is “correct,” no more than I assumed, when I depicted the lives of a diverse collection of people in my first novel, that I was “correct.” But I was fascinated to presume that some of the feelings of these imaginary people—feelings of loss of homeland, the anxiety of assimilation, battles with faith and its opposite—had some passing relation to feelings I have had or could imagine. That our griefs were not entirely unrelated. The joy of writing that book—and the risk of it—was in the uncertainty. I’d never been to war, Bangladesh, or early-twentieth-century Jamaica. I was not, myself, an immigrant. Could I make the reader believe in the imaginary people I placed in these fictional situations? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on the reader. “I don’t believe it,” the reader is always free to say, when confronted with this emotion or that, one action or another. Novels are machines for falsely generating belief and they succeed or fail on that basis. I know I can read the first sentence of a novel and find my reaction is I don’t believe you . And many a reader must surely have turned from White Teeth in exactly the same spirit.

Yet the belief we’re talking about is not empirical. In the writing of that book, I could not be “wrong,” exactly, but I could be—and often was—totally unconvincing. I could fail to make my reader believe, but with the understanding that the belief for which fiction aims is of a very strange kind when we recall that everything in a novel is, by definition, not true. What, then, do we mean by it? In my capacity as a writing teacher, I’ve noticed, in the classroom, the emergence of a belief that fiction can or should be the product of an absolute form of “correctness.” The student explains that I should believe in her character because this is exactly how X type of person would behave. How does she know? Because, as it happens, she herself is X type of person. Or she knows because she has spent a great deal of time researching X type of person, and this novel is the consequence of her careful research. (Similar arguments can be found in the interviews of professional writers.)

As if fiction could argue itself into a reader’s belief system! As if, armed with our collection of facts about what an X type of person feels, is, and does, always and everywhere, a writer could hope to bypass the intimate judgment of a reader, which happens sentence by sentence, moment by moment. Is it this judgment we fear? It’s so uncertain, so risky. You can’t quantify it—it’s not data. It happens between one reader and one writer. It’s a meeting—or sometimes a clash—of sensibilities, which often takes the form, as Dickinson understood, of griefs compared.

What do I have in common with Olive Kitteridge, a salty old white woman who has spent her entire life in Maine? And yet, as it turns out, her griefs are like my own. Not all of them. It’s not a perfect mapping of self onto book—I’ve never met a book that did that, least of all my own. But some of Olive’s grief weighed like mine. Certainly I might turn from a writer like Elizabeth Strout toward a writer like Toni Morrison and find our griefs more closely aligned, for obvious reasons like race and class, which two contingencies do so much to form a person’s experience and therefore their sensibilities. But what passed between me and Olive was not nothing. I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.

But reading seems to be easier to defend than writing. Writing is a far larger act of presumption. Sensing this, we seek to shore up the act of writing with false defenses, like the dubious idea that one could ever be absolutely “correct” when it comes to representing fictional human behavior. I understand the desire—I have it myself—but what I don’t get is how anyone can possibly hope to achieve it. What does it mean, after all, to say “A Bengali woman would never say that!” or “A gay man would never feel that!” or “A black woman would never do that!”? How can such things possibly be claimed absolutely, unless we already have some form of fixed caricature in our minds? (It is to be noted that the argument “A white man would never say that!” is rarely heard and is almost structurally unimaginable. Why? Because to be such a self is to be afforded all possible human potentialities, not only a circumscribed few.)

But perhaps I am asking the question the wrong way round. The counterargument would be that when it comes to presumption, we are in far less danger of error when writer and subject are as alike as possible. The risk of containment is the risk of false knowledge being presented as truth—it is the risk of caricature. Those who are unlike us have a long and dismal history of trying to contain us in false images. And so—the argument runs—if we are to be contained by language, let that language at least be our own.

In an ideal world, one way to mitigate the problem of false containment would be with variety. I can’t imagine the white man who felt, upon the publication of Rabbit, Run , contained or threatened as a white man by Updike’s portrayal of Rabbit Angstrom—but then there were such a variety of portrayals of white men in the culture that no one presentation had to bear the weight of representation of an entire people. Rabbit Angstrom was not the white man. He was just one white man among many, and so Updike’s portrayal of him had no power to distort a white man’s social capital in America. (Meanwhile, the black men in Updike’s books, almost all caricatures, are precisely evidence of grotesque containment.) By contrast, when Margaret Mitchell published Gone With the Wind , there were a vanishingly small number of nontoxic representations of black women in the culture, and therefore the damage Mitchell did with her notorious “Mammy” character was substantial: she placed a fresh dose of an old poison into the culture that still exists and reached even me, aged twelve, in my little corner of London, looking for some form of cultural reflection, any kind at all, but finding only distorted mirrors, monstrous cliché, debasing ridicule, false containment.

Given this history, it’s natural that we should fear and be suspicious of representations of us by those who are not like us. Equally rational is the assumption that those who are like us will at least take care with their depictions, and will be motivated by love and intimate knowledge instead of prejudice and phobia. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writing by women, and by oppressed minorities of all kinds, has wondrously expanded the literary landscape, ennobling griefs that had, historically, either passed unnoticed or been brutally suppressed and caricatured. We’re eager to speak for ourselves. But in our justified desire to level or even obliterate the old power structures—to reclaim our agency when it comes to the representation of selves—we can, sometimes, forget the mystery that lies at the heart of all selfhood. Of what a self may contain that is both unseen and ultimately unknowable. Of what invisible griefs we might share, over and above our many manifest and significant differences. We also forget what writers are: people with voices in our heads and a great deal of inappropriate curiosity about the lives of others.

Most of us have love for, and interest in, our own lives—our “own people.” Our lives are nonfiction. This is my family. My neighborhood. My body. My reality. Fiction, as a mode, shared this love and interest but always with the twist of, well, fiction. It was always interested not only in how things are but also in how things might be otherwise. I once wrote a novel about an imaginary, multihyphenated British-Jewish-Chinese boy. It was love and interest that motivated me, but my love and interest was located in the other. In my case, love of and interest in Judaism and Buddhism—two systems of thought in which I have no birthright. But also deep curiosity about this imagined person, Alex-Li, whose voice I had in my head.

Alex-Li is a weird, nerdy, obsessive, melancholy type of guy. Though you wouldn’t know it to look at him, he’s probably more “like me” than any character I ever created. But the question is: In what does this “like me” consist? He doesn’t look like me. We don’t share the same gods. We don’t share the same race or gender. But he is a part of my soul. And fiction is one of the few places left on this earth where a crazy sentence like that makes any sense at all. Alex-Li is not “correct.” He cannot and doesn’t aim to represent the community of half-Jewish, half-Chinese people. In the spirit of Kafka, he barely represents himself. And so it may be that by his existence he is in fact oppressive, simply because he is “taking up space” where a “real” half-Jewish, half-Chinese fictional character might be. He cannot defend himself from that accusation—and it would be out of character for him to try. All he can say is that he doesn’t mind if he is unread, unbought, unloved. But if even one person happens to come across him and find that his feelings and their own have a similar weight, then he will have completed his absurd fictional role in this world.

Perhaps “containment” and the “fascination to presume” are not that different. They carry the same risk: being wrong. Maybe we only think of it as containment when it goes wrong. The textbook example is Madame Bovary . For over a century, women have profoundly identified with this imaginary woman, created by a man, who himself supposedly claimed an outrageous personal identification with the other: Madame Bovary, c’est moi. I am one of those women readers, and yet there are many moments in Madame Bovary when I feel the presence of a masculine consciousness behind it all, as I do when I read Anna Karenina . Which is to say the mapping of self to other that Flaubert and Tolstoy attempted is not perfect. But it is not nothing. Anna Karenina has meant as much to me as any imaginary woman could.

And I, along with generations of women readers, have wondered: How could a man know so much of us? But the mystery is not so mysterious. Husbands know a great deal about wives, after all, and wives about husbands. Lovers know each other. Brothers know a lot about sisters and vice versa. Muslims and Christians and Jews know one another, or think they do. Our social and personal lives are a process of continual fictionalization, as we internalize the other-we-are-not, dramatize them, imagine them, speak for them and through them. The accuracy of this fictionalization is never guaranteed, but without an ability to at least guess at what the other might be thinking, we could have no social lives at all. One of the things fiction did is make this process explicit—visible. All storytelling is the invitation to enter a parallel space, a hypothetical arena, in which you have imagined access to whatever is not you. And if fiction had a belief about itself, it was that fiction had empathy in its DNA , that it was the product of compassion. I could fill a library with self-congratulatory quotes about this belief, but I will choose one I found recently in a memoir by the wonderful Colombian writer Héctor Abad:

Compassion is largely a quality of the imagination: it consists of the ability to imagine what we would feel if we were suffering the same situation. It has always seemed to me that people without compassion lack a literary imagination—the capacity great novels give us for putting ourselves in another’s place—and are incapable of seeing that life has many twists and turns and that at any given moment we could find ourselves in someone else’s shoes: suffering pain, poverty, oppression, injustice or torture.

This was what fiction believed about itself, but like all beliefs not a little of it was always wishful thinking. Has fiction, over the centuries, been the creator of compassion or a vehicle for containment? I think we can make both cases. Fiction was often interested in the other but more often than not spoke for the other instead of actually publishing them. Fiction gave us Madame Bovary but also Uncle Tom. (It’s also given us a marvelous, separate literature that has no interest in human selves of any kind—which is concerned instead with animals, trees, extraterrestrials, inanimate objects, ideas, language itself.) But whether fiction’s curiosity about the other was compassionate or containing, one thing you could always say for it was that it was interested.

By contrast, a prominent component of the new philosophy is a performative display of non-interest, a great pride in not being interested in the other, which is sometimes characterized as revenge and sometimes as an act of self-preservation. (When you feel hatred coming from the other, it’s reasonable to turn from the other completely.) The expression of this pride usually comes in some version of I’ve had enough of , I just can’t with— fill in the blank. And the strange thing is that the people we now cast into this place of non-interest were once the very people fiction was most curious about. The conflicted, the liars, the self-deceiving, the willfully blind, the abject, the unresolved, the imperfect, the evil, the unwell, the lost and divided. Those were once fiction’s people.

What all liberation movements want, surely, is comprehension and compassion. Their members want to be seen and named correctly. To be respected and known. But that is by no means all they want. They also want to be free. They want education and rights and the ability to live in safety. Sometimes, in order to secure these things, an ideology of separatism emerges, because the compassion of the other is in no way available, or has historically never appeared, and it is assumed it never will. Everyone, politically and personally, has a right to the ideology of separatism. It is the hard-won right of the political realist and the student of history. But fiction’s business was with the people, all the people, all the time. This in no way meant that fiction had to be about all the people—it very rarely was—but only that the identity, sensibilities, and feelings of the reader could never be entirely known, controlled, or predetermined.

Toni Morrison wrote for her people primarily. But a variety of readers will be moved by the stations of the cross depicted within. And be surprised to find griefs not unlike their own, just as Morrison found griefs not unlike her own in Faulkner and—if you read her academic essays on American literature—a thousand less likely places. Even if we practice a form of separatism in our fiction—books for our people, our community, our crowd—the infinite variety of selves and experience that lie within whoever claims to be “a people” will overwhelm any fantasy we have of controlling the reactions of our readers. I can still pick up a novel by a woman like me in every particular—same race, class, sexuality, nationality, heritage—read the first sentence and find she is not, after all, “like me.” Our sensibilities are different. Our griefs have different weights. But none of this will make me either put her book aside or read it ravenously. The only thing that can decide the fitness (or otherwise) of a book for me is this mysterious belief, which a writer can’t summon by citing her copious research or explaining to me that all of this “really happened.” Belief in a novel is, for me, a by-product of a certain kind of sentence. Familiarity, kinship, and compassion will play their part, but if the sentences don’t speak to me, nothing else will. I believe in a sentence of balance, care, rigor, and integrity. The sort of sentence that makes me feel—against all empirical evidence to the contrary—that what I am reading is, fictionally speaking, true.

We behave as if we don’t want to be known by one another, but we sometimes seem oblivious to the idea that we spend our days feeding ourselves into a great engine of knowing, one that believes it knows every single thing about us: our tastes, our opinions, our beliefs, what we’ll buy, who we’ll love, where we’ll go. The unseen actors who harvest this knowledge not only hope to know us perfectly but also to modify us, to their own ends. And this essay, too, will no doubt enter that same digital maw, and be transformed from ideas to data points, and responded to, perhaps, with a series of pat phrases, first spotted by the machine, then turned viral, and now returned to us as if it were our own language. “I just can’t with Zadie Smith right now,” or else “This Zadie Smith is everything,” or—well, you know the drill. We’ve gotten into the habit of not experiencing the private, risky act of reading so much as performing our response to what we read, which is then translated into data points.

And the dark joke at the end of it all is that these unique selves to which we feel so attached, that we believe to be nontransferable, and with which some of us hope to write fiction—these spectacularly individualized selves who hold this opinion rather than that, who claim one identity as superior to another—are entirely irrelevant to the second, shadow text that lies behind it all. To the technological monopolies that buy and sell your data—and for whom your daily input of personal information is only raw product, to be traded like orange juice futures or corn yields—you reveal yourself not so much in your views or hot takes as by the frequency of your posts or tweets, their length or syntax, the pattern of their links and follows. They do not care that you are woke or unwoke, patriot or activist. To that shadow text, all you are is data. You are the person who tweets fourteen times in twenty minutes and therefore is needy in some way and vulnerable to a particular kind of political advertising, or else you are the person who moves through a series of lifestyle and news sites, which route will predict, with extraordinary specificity, the likelihood of your booking a vacation in early February or voting in November.

This data version of you is “correct” to the nth degree: it sees all and knows all, and makes the fuzzy knowledge of selves that fiction once claimed look truly pathetic. A book does not watch us reading it; it cannot morph itself, page by page, to suit our tastes, or deliver to us only depictions of people we already know and among whom we feel comfortable. It cannot note our reactions and then skew its stories to confirm our worldview or reinforce our prejudices. A book does not know when we pick it up and put it down; it cannot nudge us into the belief that we must look at it first thing upon waking and last thing at night, and though it may prove addictive, it will never know exactly how or why. Only the algorithms can do all this—and so much more. *

By now, the idea of depriving this digital maw of its daily diet of “you” has become inconceivable. Meanwhile, the closed circle that fiction once required—reader, writer, book—feels so antiquated we hardly see the point of it. Why have a silent dialogue with an invisible person about imaginary things? Besides, the question of fiction’s utility is, in truth, another ambivalent tale. How many compassionate stories about the other do we need to tell you before you see us as fully human, the way you see yourself? Depending on what you believe, either all those compassionate stories made no difference at all, or they are the foundation upon which all liberation movements stand.

To speak for myself, as a reader, the balance has been on the side of compassion. I have closed novels and stared at their back covers for a long moment and felt known in a way I cannot honestly say I have felt known by many real-life interactions with human beings, or even by myself. For though the other may not know us perfectly or even well, the hard truth is we do not always know ourselves perfectly or well. Indeed, there are things to which subjectivity is blind and which only those on the outside can see. But, frustratingly, there are no fixed rules to regulate this process. We know some representations are privileged and some ignored. Prejudice in these matters must be thought through, each and every time. Is this novel before me an attempt at compassion or an act of containment? Each reader will decide. This is the work of an individual consciousness and cannot be delegated to generalized arguments, not even the prepackaged mental container of “cultural appropriation.”

We can suspect that some people will tell our story better than others. But we can never be entirely certain. Despite the confidence of the data harvesters, a self can never be known perfectly or in its entirety. The intimate meeting between a book and its reader can’t be predetermined. To put it another way, a book can try to modify your behavior, but it has no way of knowing for sure that it has. In front of a book you are still free. Between reader and book, there is only the continual risk of wrongness, word by word, sentence by sentence. The Internet does not get to decide. Nor does the writer. Only the reader decides. So decide.

October 24, 2019

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Zadie Smith’s latest story collection, Grand Union , was published in 2019. (January 2023)

For more on the digital exploitation and modification of selfhood, see Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2019).  ↩

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Other Voices, Other Selves

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By Pankaj Mishra

• Jan. 14, 2010

“To write critically in English,” Zadie Smith asserts in the opening essay of “Changing My Mind,” “is to aspire to neutrality, to the high style of, say, Lionel Trilling or Edmund Wilson.” Praising Zora Neale Hurston, Smith complains that the mandarin critical mode elevates the experiences of white people to the norm while making “black women talking about a black book” look sectarian. Smith’s own way of escaping this narrow assumption is to declare boldly, “Fact is, I am a black woman.” A writer like Hurston, Smith adds, makes “ ‘black woman-ness’ appear a real, tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share, however improbably, with millions of complex individuals.” Hurston also allows Smith “to say things I wouldn’t normally — things like “She is my sister and I love her.”

After this sonorous declaration, you might expect Smith to reclaim writers and books on behalf of millions of complex individuals whose experiences are misrepresented, insufficiently written about or simply ignored. But she means for us to take the title of her book seriously. “Ideological inconsistency,” she writes in her foreword, “is, for me, practically an article of faith.” The essays that follow discuss some prominent dead white writers (George Eliot, Kafka, E. M. Forster, Nabokov, Barthes, David Foster Wallace), but they display no Edward Said-style counterreading of canonical texts. Their quirky pleasures derive from Smith’s own critical persona — always bold, jauntily self-reflexive and amusing — and her inspired cultural references, which include both Simone Weil and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

There is little hint of Smith’s culturally diverse background in her essays on (mostly Hollywood) movies and stars; they belong recognizably to an Anglo-American tradition of writing about cinema that alternates between masochistic reverence and slash-and-burn japery. And Smith resembles a French avant-gardist of the 1950s and ’60s rather than a postcolonial writer in her most ambitious essay, “Two Directions for the Novel,” which attacks the metaphysical pretensions of the “lyrical-realist” tradition that evidently dominates “Anglophone” fiction.

In this essay (which compares Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland” with Tom McCar­thy’s “Remainder”), Smith passes over the many novels from outside the West that have helped expand traditional bourgeois notions of self and identity. Yet her essay on Barack Obama is replete with the postcolonial-cum-postmodernist themes — hybridity, mimicry and ambivalence — that professors of literature and cultural studies commonly employ in American and British universities. Smith’s hope that Obama’s “flexibility of voice” may lead to “flexibility in all things” derives not so much from hardheaded political analysis as from academic high theory, which assumes that those who live between cultures best represent and articulate the human condition today. According to Smith, the moral of Obama’s story is that “each man must be true to his selves, plural.”

On this point, at least, Smith is ideologically consistent. In fact, the idea that “the unified singular self is an illusion” could be the leitmotif of this collection. It allows Smith to revisit her own early assumptions and to question such essentialist notions as “black woman-ness.” Reflecting on Kafka’s ambivalence about his ethnic background, she writes: “There is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish question (‘What have I in common with Jews?’) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We’re all insects, all Ungeziefer, now.”

This may sound a bit melodramatic. But then — as Salman Rushdie and other practitioners of postcolonial postmodernism have stressed — ambivalence, doubt and confusion are essential to forming dynamic new hybrid selves. Smith seems to bring to this now entrenched critical orthodoxy the particular weltschmerz of today’s bright, successful but sad young writers. This is most evident in the collection’s final essay, a long and passionately argued panegyric to David Foster Wallace in which Smith diagnoses the central dilemmas of her own increasingly lost generation. These are dilemmas, she argues, that Henry James, who assumed awareness leads to responsibility, never encountered: “the ubiquity of television, the voraciousness of late capitalism, the triumph of therapeutic discourse and philosophy’s demotion into a branch of linguistics.”

Smith writes with a beguiling mix of assurance and solemnity, borrowing her vocabulary from many intellectual and cultural sources. But a few of her readers may still pause to wonder if the growing irrelevance of academic philosophy is as strong an influence — even on people at university campuses — as the ravages of “late capitalism.” For someone so apparently world-weary, Smith can often appear profoundly unworldly. Writing about a trip to Liberia organized by Oxfam, she wavers distractingly from the arch (“There are such things as third-world products”) to tourist-brochure blandness (“Bong country is beautiful. Lush green forest, a sweet breeze”) to stock atrocity journalism (“A narrow corridor of filth, lined on either side with small dwellings made of trash, mud, scrap metal. Children with distended bellies, rotting food, men breaking rocks”).

Compiling an assortment of details, Smith declines to fit them into a pattern. Her essay called “Ten Notes on Oscar Weekend” has the shapelessness implied by its title. Smith visibly moves with greater ease through the decipherable world of texts, but here she often gets bogged down in over-interpretation. The work of David Foster Wallace, an estimable writer of undoubtedly great unfulfilled promise, can’t bear the weight of meaning Smith bestows on it, deploying references that range from Zen koans to Noam Chomsky. Lines like “How to be in the world when the world has collapsed into language?” bear too much resemblance to the effusions of an aspirant for a Ph.D. in philosophy.

When writing out of her own memory and experience, Smith can quickly cast a spell: her essay on British comedy, which movingly commemorates her father, is among her best. But her preferred stance as a literary and philosophical insurgent, with its related weakness for rousing manifestos, often yields a disconcerting intellectual and moral imprecision. Far from being a complacent purveyor of a triumphant “white” culture, Edmund Wilson wrote feelingly about the Iroquois and Zuni Indians and other endangered minority cultures. We may all be insects now, but a Muslim insect in England doesn’t lurk in the same hole as a non-Muslim one.

Smith’s broad-brush pronouncements underscore the limitations of the academic theories she often rehearses. Having hybrid identities, not belonging anywhere or indeed belonging everywhere, may have its advantages, but these attributes must still contend with pressing circumstances like the voraciousness of 21st-century capitalism. Far from floating free in a state of unbelonging, most people are trapped in predetermined social and political positions; they must act within the history that surrounds them. The possession of multiple selves and voices doesn’t seem to be helping — and may even be inhibiting — Barack Obama. The victims of the seemingly endless violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan would draw scant comfort from the knowledge that the present occupant of the White House has an ear for different accents and can mimic everyone from a white Harvard nerd to a Ken­yan elder.

Smith’s intellectual ambitions are remarkably consistent with those of the postcolonial writers and academics who have settled into the abstractions of a posh postmodernism. “Changing My Mind” displays many of its virtues: a cosmopolitan suavity and wit that often relieves intellectual ponderousness. Smith’s native intelligence, however, seems so formidable that you can’t help hoping she’ll change her mind yet again.

CHANGING MY MIND

Occasional essays.

By Zadie Smith

306 pp. The Penguin Press. $26.95

Pankaj Mishra is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

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On Killing Charles Dickens

For the first thirty years of my life, I lived within a one-mile radius of Willesden Green Tube Station. It’s true I went to college—I even moved to East London for a bit—but such interludes were brief. I soon returned to my little corner of North West London. Then suddenly, quite abruptly, I left not just the city but England itself. First for Rome, then Boston, and then my beloved New York, where I stayed ten years. When friends asked why I’d left the country, I’d sometimes answer with a joke: Because I don’t want to write a historical novel . Perhaps it was an in-joke: only other English novelists really understood what I meant by it. And there were other, more obvious reasons. My English father had died. My Jamaican mother was pursuing a romance in Ghana. I myself had married an Irish poet who liked travel and adventure and had left the island of his birth at the age of eighteen. My ties to England seemed to be evaporating. I would not say I was entirely tired of London. No, I was not yet—in Samuel Johnson ’s famous formulation—“tired of life.” But I was definitely weary of London’s claustrophobic literary world, or at least the role I had been assigned within it: multicultural (aging) wunderkind. Off I went.

Like many expats, we thought about returning. Lots of factors kept us abroad, not least of which the complication of a child, and the roots she swiftly put down. Still, periodically, we would give in to fits of regret and nostalgia, two writers worrying away at the idea that they had travelled too far from the source of their writings. After all, a writer can be deracinated to death. . . . Sometimes, to make ourselves feel better, we’d make the opposite case. Take Irish writers—we’d say to ourselves—take Beckett and Joyce. See also: Edna O’Brien . See also: Colum and Colm. Didn’t they all write about home while living many miles away from it? Then the doubt would creep back in again. (The Irish always being an exceptional case.) What about French writers? Caribbean writers? African writers? Here the data seemed less conclusive. Throughout all this equivocation, I kept clinging to the one piece of data about which I felt certain: any writer who lives in England for any length of time will sooner or later find herself writing a historical novel, whether she wants to or not. Why is that? Sometimes I think it’s because our nostalgia loop is so small—so tight. There are, for example, people in England right now who can bring themselves to Proustian tears at the memory of the Spice Girls or MiniDiscs or phone boxes—it doesn’t take much—and this must all have an effect on our literary culture. The French tend to take the term nouveau roman literally. Meanwhile, the English seem to me constitutionally mesmerized by the past. Even “ Middlemarch ” is a historical novel! And though plenty English myself, I retained a prejudice against the form, dating back to student days, when we were inclined to think of historical novels as aesthetically and politically conservative by definition.

If you pick up a novel and find that it could have been written at any time in the past hundred years, well, then, that novel is not quite doing its self-described job, is it? Surely, it’s in the very DNA of the novel to be new? So I have always thought. But, over time, the specious logic of these student arguments has come under some pressure, specifically after I read several striking examples of the genre. “ Memoirs of Hadrian ,” by Marguerite Yourcenar, is not written in Latin, and “ Measuring the World ,” by my friend Daniel Kehlmann, is not in old German. Even the language of “ Wolf Hall ” has very little to do with real Tudor syntax: it is Mantellian through and through. All three bring news. Not all historical fiction cosplays its era, and an exploration of the past need not be a slavish imitation of it. You can come at the past from an interrogative angle, or a sly remove, and some historical fiction will radically transform your perspective not just on the past but on the present. These ideas are of course obvious to long-term fans of historical fiction, but they were new to me. I laid down my ideological objection. Which was lucky—and self-serving—because around 2012 I stumbled upon a story from the nineteenth century that I knew at once had my name all over it. It concerned a court battle of 1873—among the longest in British history—in which Arthur Orton, a butcher from Wapping, claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the long-missing, presumed-drowned heir to the Doughty-Tichborne estate.

The plight of the Tichborne Claimant, as he came to be known, was a cause célèbre of its day, not least because the Claimant’s star witness and stoutest defender turned out to be a Jamaican ex-slave called Andrew Bogle, who had worked for the Tichbornes and insisted that he recognized Sir Roger. Now, one might imagine that the court testimony of a poor black man in 1873 would be met with widespread skepticism, but the British Public—like its cousin, the American People—is full of surprises, and having seen so many working-class defendants mistreated by bourgeois juries, Etonian lawyers, and aristocratic judges, the people were more than ready to support a poor man’s claim to be a rich one. Huge crowds filled the courtroom, eager to see one of their own win, for once. (A perverse sentiment, perhaps, but one we might recognize from the O.J. trial.) Bogle and his butcher became national heroes.

This extraordinary story struck me like a found art object: perfect for my purposes. One of those gifts from the universe a writer gets once in a lifetime. But it was eight years before I finally sat down at my desk to unwrap it. In the meantime, I did everything I could to avoid writing my historical novel. I stayed in America, far from British libraries and court transcripts. We had another child. I wrote four more books. But, through it all, I continued to lurk around the subject in a casual way, like a nervous woman on a dating app, never quite swiping right. I would read a few history books, make some notes, get anxious, put the idea back in the drawer. I still did not want to write a historical novel. I feared the amount of work involved. This worry was not eased by watching my New York neighbor—the aforementioned Daniel Kehlmann—doing the necessary reading for another historical novel, “ Tyll ,” set in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War. He did it at the N.Y.U. playground, while his child played with ours. He did it on park benches. He did it in libraries. He seemed to do it day and night for about five years. Whenever I asked him how it was going, he would say it was exhausting and the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: “Like doing a Ph.D. and writing a novel simultaneously. So many notes!” I did not like the sound of that. Generally speaking, I don’t make notes. I sit down. I write a novel. But already this non-novel that I was refusing to write had generated a drawer full of notes and a shelf of books. I said to myself: my studying days are over. I said to myself: if you let this happen it will play to your worst, your most long-winded, your most Dickensian instincts. Already every Tichborne thread I pulled seemed to lead to yet another rich tapestry of nineteenth-century life, one that required yet more books to be ordered, and another folder of notes to be made. I was already profoundly boring the members of my household: “Did you know that in 1848 . . . ” I said to myself: Zadie, your novels are long enough when they’re about nothing! What’s going to happen when actual facts are involved? Walk away, Smith, walk away!

Hanging over all this anxiety was the long shadow of Dickens . To be my age, bookish, and born in England was to grow up under that tiresomely gigantic influence. Dickens was everywhere. He was in school and on the shelves at home and in the library. He invented Christmas. He was in politics, influencing changes in labor law, educational law, even copyright law. He was the original working-class hero—radiant symbol of our supposed meritocracy—as well as a crown jewel of the English Heritage tourist industry. (In other words, he was posthumously manipulated by many different sections of British society to score a variety of political points.) He was also everywhere I wanted to be: in the theatre, in Italy, in America. Televised versions of his books were on rotation—there is a case to be made that Dickens is the reason that we have prestige-TV miniseries in the first place—and he was in the goddam Muppets and all over Hollywood, in conscious adaptation and unconscious theft. I personally read far too much of him as a child, and though I grew up to have all the usual doubts and caveats about him—too sentimental, too theatrical, too moralistic, too controlling—I was also never able to quite get out from under his embarrassing influence, as much as I’ve often wanted to. So it went with my surreptitious research. No matter where I found myself in nineteenth-century London, I’d run into Dickens. In the main chapters, in the index, in parentheses or out of them—all roads led back to Charles. There didn’t seem to be a nineteenth-century pot he didn’t have his finger in.

I could be minding my own business reading about, say, an uprising in Jamaica, and suddenly there he was again, signing a petition on the matter. I’d be reading about a long-dead, long-forgotten writer, William Harrison Ainsworth—a resident of my neighborhood—and there Dickens would be, befriending him. I’d read a book about American slavery and discover him in the footnotes! At which point I’d find myself saying, Oh , hi , Charles , like an actual crazy person. Then lockdown arrived, and like everyone else I went a little crazy. I hunted down every out-of-print William Harrison Ainsworth novel. (He wrote more than forty; they’re mostly awful.) I grew increasingly interested in William’s housekeeper, a woman called Eliza Touchet. I became obsessed with the plantation on which Andrew Bogle had been enslaved—the Hope Estate—and the long, brutal entanglement between England and Jamaica. I read several books about the Tichborne Claimant and thought a lot about fraud: fake identities, fake news, fake relationships, fake histories. When I tried to explain to anyone what all these subjects had in common, I did not sound like a person writing a historical novel as much as a person who had entirely lost the plot. Or perhaps: who had rediscovered plot. I called my novel “ The Fraud .” And then, in May, 2020, just as I finally put finger to keyboard, we moved back to England, in time to join the British lockdown.

With nothing to do and nowhere to go, I took my regulation walk through the streets like my fellow-Britons, but with the small difference that my eyes always remained above shop level: trained upward to the eaves and the cornices and the chimneys. Toward the nineteenth century, in other words, which is everywhere in North West London, once you start looking. I began haunting the local graveyards. I found William Ainsworth’s grave and Eliza Touchet’s grave, and could point on a map to the unmarked pauper’s grave of the Tichborne Claimant, as well as the corner of King’s Cross where Bogle breathed his last. It was 2020 outside but 1870 in my head. I had effectively completely conceded: I was back in England and I was writing a historical novel. My pride rested now on one principle: no Dickens. This meant—at the very least—no orphans, no lengthy Dickensian descriptions, and absolutely no mean women called Mrs. Spitely or cowards called Mr. Fearfaint, or what have you. To insure this, I was careful to reread no Dickens, and, aside from his frequent appearances in my research materials, I tried my best to put the man out of my mind. But one of the lessons of writing fiction is that truth is stranger than it. The fact that a real person I was writing about was called Eliza Touchet—and that this same woman was beginning to bloom in my mind, until she dwarfed all the other characters—meant that I now had to face the prospect of my novel strongly featuring a woman whose name even Dickens would have considered a bit too on the nose. Touché, Mrs. Touchet! But that wasn’t even the last joke Dickens had to play on me, from beyond the grave.

About halfway through my research, his name started leaping up out of the footnotes and into the main body of the text, as a real-life actor in the events I was concerned with, and it became clear to me that in order to tell the whole of my true story there was really no way to entirely avoid Mr. Charles Dickens making an actual appearance in my actual pages. For several years, he was a regular dinner guest of Ainsworth’s. He was involved in a debate about the future of Jamaica. (He was on the wrong side of the debate.) Most mind-bogglingly, Doughty Street—where Dickens once lived—is in that corner of South East Bloomsbury which belongs to the Doughty-Tichborne estate. Which meant that Dickens’s former home was a piece of what my Claimant was trying to claim. Dickens was everywhere, like weather.

Sometimes, in writing, you have to give up control, take a Zen attitude, and go where you’re being led, which is often right back to where you came from. So I said to Mr. Dickens: Look. You can have a walk-on part , but then I am killing you in the following chapter , straightaway. You won’t be hanging around and you won’t be making any witty speeches or imparting any wisdom . I was as good as my word, killing him in a paragraph, in a very brief, un-Dickensian chapter titled “Dickens Is Dead!” Immediately, I felt that sense of catharsis which people often believe writing brings but which I myself have experienced only rarely. Look at me! (I said to myself.) I just killed Dickens! (By describing his sudden death and subsequent burial at Westminster Abbey.) But, not long after I wrote that triumphant scene, for practical reasons (a flashback) Charles made his inevitable return, appearing as a younger and even more irrepressible force than he had been forty pages earlier. At that point, I gave up. I let him pervade my pages, in the same way he stalks through nineteenth-century London. He’s there in the air and the comedy and the tragedy and the politics and the literature. He’s there where he had no business being (for example, in debates about the future of Jamaica). He’s there as a sometimes oppressive, sometimes irresistible, sometimes delightful, sometimes overcontrolling influence, just as he was in life. Just as he has always been in my life. But childhood influences are like that. They drive you crazy precisely because your debt to them is far larger than you want to know or care to admit. See also: parents.

Eleven years later, at the very end of the long gestation and writing period of my historical novel, I closed my laptop and said to myself: I know he often infuriates you, but the truth is you never could have written this without him. With this debt in mind, then, I decided to do something I have avoided doing all my London life: I made a pilgrimage to Westminster Abbey. Walked around the back to Poets’ Corner and stood right on Charles Dickens’s grave. Oh , hi , Charles . Feeling my debt, but also hoping that it was paid in full, at long last. And when I got back home, completely finished with the unavoidable Mr. Dickens and his influence and wanting to do something that required no reading and no notes and no research at all—something like watching a bit of telly—I turned on the good old BBC, and what was on the menu? A new “ Great Expectations .” A “color-blind” version, sure, but still “Great Expectations.” Oh , hi , Charles . Hello and goodbye and hello again. ♦

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Six novels you can read in a day

Reluctant to start on a big masterpiece try these small gems instead.

F OR A SMALL format the novella carries a lot of baggage—starting with its diminutive. It has long been seen as the middle child of the literary world: it is neither the fully fledged novel, nor the fussed-over baby of the literary family, the short story. Presented with a work of between 60 and 160 pages, agents and editors typically tell an author to scale up or pare back. Melville House, an independent publisher in New York that prides itself on publishing novellas, calls them a “renegade art form”.

In its economy and audacity, an exceptional novella comes close to poetry. It doesn’t overstay its welcome. You can read one in the time it takes to watch a play or a film, then rise from your chair with the exhilaration of having finished a work in one sitting. Zipping through several novellas can cultivate a reading habit. Many of the greatest authors have written at least one: James Joyce (“The Dead”), Ernest Hemingway (“The Old Man and the Sea”), Mary Shelley (“Mathilda”) and Leo Tolstoy (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich”), to name just a few. Here are six short novels that may enchant you.

Small Things Like These. By Claire Keegan. Grove Atlantic; 128 pages; $20. Faber & Faber; £12.99

A hard-working coal merchant with a tidy life stumbles upon a scandal, and finds a deep, unstoppable need to do what is right. There is nothing easy about that: Bill Furlong must set aside his wife’s pleas and the warnings of villagers—well-intentioned yet also complicit—who urge him to ignore what he saw in the coal shed of a convent. He knows that his actions will hurt his daughters’ prospects for an education. “Once more the ordinary part of him simply wanted to be rid of this and get on home.” Furlong does not—finds he cannot—give in to it. The book’s gorgeous use of symbolism is reminiscent at times of a fairytale: crows roost around the convent, strutting and cawing ominously. But the crime it depicts is all too real, rooted in the history of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland run by the Roman Catholic Church. “Small Things Like These” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, the shortest novel so far to gain that distinction.

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? By Lorrie Moore. Knopf; 160 pages; $16. Faber & Faber; £9.99

Lorrie Moore’s book captures female adolescence and the intensity of its friendships. Berie, its adult narrator, tries to understand how, after the exuberance and small, wild joys of her teenage years, her life has become so staid and unfulfilling. She recounts a summer spent working at Storyland, a theme park, with her best friend, Sils: “She was my hero, and had been for almost as long as I could remember”. Their days are punctuated by cigarette breaks and jokes; they mock the small-town theme park and its tacky rides. But suddenly they must make a decision that is all too adult. It marks the beginning of the splintering of their friendship: one stays in their hometown, Horsehearts, the other leaves. Looking back, Berie sees the mockery and rebellion that the girls so enjoyed as callow answers to teenage insecurities. Yet her account vibrates with regret for what she has lost. Sils, for a magical while, had helped “keep the busy, roaring strange-tongued world at bay”. Moore’s writing is as luscious and funny as ever.

Open Water. By Caleb Azumah Nelson. Grove Atlantic; 160 pages; $16. Penguin; £9.99

The debut of a British-Ghanaian novelist published in 2021, “Open Water” is a love story that is equal parts graceful, defiant and mournful. The characters are two black British artists living in south-east London, whose blossoming love for each other is tested over the course of a year by racial injustice. Trauma and intimacy are central themes: the narrator must allow himself to soften into love, and work hard to stay there. “Seeing people”, he reflects, “is no small task.” The narrator, who addresses himself as “you” throughout the book, goes unnamed, as does the woman he loves. They share a deep admiration for many of the same black artists, among them Frank Ocean, Zadie Smith and Barry Jenkins, whose creations are referred to throughout the book. Read this while listening to the Spotify playlist that Caleb Azumah Nelson compiled for it.

Bonjour Tristesse. By Françoise Sagan. Translated by Heather Lloyd. Penguin; 112 pages; £9.99

This coming-of-age classic was a sensation when it came out in 1954. Françoise Sagan was just 18 years old. The novel takes place over the course of a summer in the south of France. Cécile, its 17-year-old narrator, spends languorous days at a secluded seaside villa in the company of her father, a philandering widower whom she adores and whose hedonism she emulates, and his latest mistress. When he begins a more serious romance with an old acquaintance, Cécile does everything she can to stop him from marrying, with tragic results. Cécile’s own heady romance—breezy sex with an earnest boy whom she later drops—and her existentialist musings shocked early readers. Questions of freedom, responsibility and how to lead a meaningful life were central to French philosophical thought of the 1950s. The novella’s opening lament is classic Sagan, and probably defined French ennui for a generation: “A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow.”

Foe. By J.M. Coetzee. Penguin; 160 pages; $16 and £8.99

This is a beautifully imaginative retelling of Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”, written from the perspective of Susan Barton, a woman cast away during a mutiny on a ship. She washes up on the desert island where Cruso (he loses the final “e” in J.M. Coetzee’s novel) and his companion, Friday, have lived for years. In this subversive retelling, Cruso is decidedly unheroic: taciturn, complacent and uninterested in improving his life on the island. Most of the story is told in a series of letters Barton writes after her rescue to Daniel Foe, a novelist. She asks him to help transform her account into a bestselling work of fiction—for in Mr Coetzee’s reimagining, this is her story, not Cruso’s. “Foe” explores the tension between truth and storytelling, and what an author owes to those who inspire him. It is also a woman’s reckoning with losing her power to express herself. But nowhere is that muting clearer, or more thorough, than in the person of Friday, here a black former slave who, for reasons that cannot be known for sure, is tongueless. He cannot even begin to tell his own story.

Masks. By Enchi Fumiko. Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. Vintage; 144 pages; $16.95 and £8.99

Among the few of Enchi Fumiko’s novels to be translated into English, in 1983, this may also be her finest. Enchi began her career as a playwright before writing fiction, for which she received little recognition until the 1950s, when “Masks” was published. It is a stone-cold story of deception, set against the backdrop of the spellbinding masks and ornate robes of traditional noh theatre. It tells the story of Mieko and her complex plot to exact revenge, for infidelity and more, on her dead husband, by manipulating the relationships between her widowed daughter-in-law and two friends who love her. Its main themes—sexual deceit, thwarted desire and the awful power of resentment—offer a reflection on the position of women in Japan at the time Enchi was writing. They also reveal her interest in spirit possession and her fascination with the powerful role of the female shaman. Although some familiarity with “The Tale of Genji” (whose 1,000-odd pages Enchi translated into modern Japanese) will enrich the reading, lack of it is no barrier to enjoying this novel in all its haunting, elegant cruelty.

Try also If you want to stick to fiction, try Jhumpa Lahiri’s short novel, “ Whereabouts” . In our appraisal in 2021 we wrote that she had taken risks for her craft that paid off beautifully. Enjoyed “Open Water”? Pick up “Small Worlds” , Caleb Azumah Nelson’s second novel, published last year: our reviewer thought it took fewer stylistic risks than his first, but told a story that has “more scope and emotional heft”. If you’re looking for non-fiction books you can read in a day, here are six to get you started. Explore our interactive article that gives estimates of how long it would take to read each of the 500 “greatest books of all time”.■

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What are your chances of acceptance?

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How to Write the Smith College Supplemental Essay 2024-2025

Smith College is a private liberal arts women’s college in Western Massachusetts. The school boasts small class sizes and close advising for over 50 areas of study. Smith is also part of both the Five College Consortium , which allows students to take courses and participate in extracurriculars at Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Hampshire College, and UMass Amherst.

Smith is pretty selective, so writing a strong essay can definitely help increase your chances of acceptance. Here’s how to respond to their supplemental essay prompt.

Smith College Supplemental Essay Prompt

What personal experiences, background or abilities would you bring to this residential environment to share with your neighbors and what would you hope your neighbors would share with you (250 words).

Smith wants to know about your individuality and worldview through your experiences, backgrounds, and abilities, and this aligns most with the Diversity archetype . Showcase how your unique perspective benefits the community and how you engage with others. As there is an emphasis on “neighbors,” make sure to prioritize community as a theme, whether that’s about embracing differences, serving the people around you, or any other variation of being a contributing member of your community. 

Essentially, you are being asked to reflect on the aspects of your identity, skills, and personality that will shape how you engage with Smith College’s residential campus community. Admissions officers want to know how you can enrich the experiences of your future neighbors, as well as what you hope to gain from living in a diverse and tight-knit environment. It’s an opportunity to highlight your ability to contribute to a communal space, while also demonstrating humility and openness to learning from others.

To brainstorm some ideas for what you’ll write about, think about the following questions:

• What personal experiences or aspects of your identity (culture, family background, hobbies, talents) would shape your role in a residential community?
• How have you contributed to your community in the past? How would that translate to a college campus or dorm environment?
• What specific values or qualities do you want your living space to reflect?
• What are you curious about learning from others who may have different backgrounds or interests than your own?
• How do you envision creating meaningful relationships with your neighbors?

Like any supplemental essay, a good response will be specific and personal. Make sure to share details about your life that impact how you interact with others; this could include any aspect of your identity, including ethnicity, race, culture, religion, socioeconomic class, gender and sexual orientation, hometown, illness or disability, and even interests and hobbies. 

How can your experiences or abilities related to one of these dimensions enrich the lives of the people around you? Think about how you contribute to your community or how you will. Then, dive into what you hope to gain from your peers to express your openness to learning from others—engagement is mutual, so don’t neglect this part of the prompt. 

Check out these examples below:

Good Example : “ I’ve always felt that food is a way to bring people together. Growing up in a Filipino household, Sunday afternoons were spent cooking lumpia and adobo with my cousins. I want to recreate this sense of warmth and familiarity in my life at Smith by hosting cooking nights where we can share our favorite family dishes. I can already imagine the smell of sizzling garlic and soy sauce filling the kitchen as we cook and talk about the comfort foods that remind us of home. But more than that, I hope my neighbors will share their own stories and traditions with me—whether it’s teaching me a new dance move, introducing me to their favorite songs, or showing me a special recipe that I can add to my collection .”

This example gives a vivid picture of how the student will contribute to the residential community by sharing memories and traditions related to their cultural background. It also balances their desire to learn from others, creating a sense of true exchange. The focus on food as a way to connect adds a personal and tangible element with elements of storytelling.

Bad Example: “ In the Smith dorms, I would bring a positive attitude and help others when needed. I’ve always been someone who people can count on, and I hope that my neighbors will see that I am trustworthy to talk to when they need help. I also hope that I will meet people from different backgrounds who can teach me about their experiences when they come to me to talk something out. It will be great to live with people who are different from me and learn from them. Creating authentic connections with my neighbors is an important way to create a community and make sure everyone feels supported. ”

This example is generic and doesn’t show any specific aspects of the student’s background or personality. While it mentions wanting to help others and learn from peers, it lacks detail on how the student plans to engage with the community. It could be written by anyone and doesn’t provide any personal reflection or depth to the writing.

Your response should be intentional and reflective when it demonstrates how your personal background and abilities will enrich your residential community at Smith. This will help show admissions officers that you’re ready to be an active, engaged, and open-minded member of the campus community who contributes to the culture of the college.

Where to Get Your Smith College Essays Edited for Free

Do you want feedback on your Smith College essays? After rereading your essays countless times, it can be difficult to evaluate your writing objectively. That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool , where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays. 

Need feedback faster? Get a free, nearly-instantaneous essay review from Sage, our AI tutor and advisor. Sage will rate your essay, give you suggestions for improvement, and summarize what admissions officers would take away from your writing. Use these tools to improve your chances of acceptance to your dream school!

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Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays Kindle Edition

• Print length 324 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Penguin Books
• Publication date October 22, 2009
• File size 2245 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
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Amazon.com review, about the author, from audiofile, product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B002TV07CY
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; 1st edition (October 22, 2009)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 22, 2009
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 2245 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 324 pages
• #17 in World Literature Short Stories
• #33 in Books & Reading Literary Criticism
• #92 in Essays (Kindle Store)

About the author

Zadie smith.

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time, as well as three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations, and a collection of short stories, Grand Union.

White Teeth won multiple awards, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and NW was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a regular contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.

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Customers say the author shows great insight into the writings of Forster, Eliot, Barthes, Nabokov, and Kafka. They also find the book entertaining, with sections on literature.

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Customers find the writing style highly readable, intelligent, and engaging. They also say the author is an extremely talented wordsmith and inspires them to discover new works.

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