Review: Swing Time

Swing Time by Zadie Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like almost everyone who read it, I was blown away by Smith’s White Teeth. She established herself as one of the British heavyweights – on a par with Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, or Martin Amis in her capacity to write a novel of ideas – but she did so as someone younger, hipper, female and mixed race. I hadn’t made it to anything else of hers, but that was enough for me to place her in the big leagues.

The first part of this strikes me as equal to that exceptional level. Smith has a gift for tight prose that gives nuanced psychological portraits of her characters, and she writes with both muscle and grace. As this goes along, though, she works through a split narrative that doesn’t quite seem to justify its complexity.

As I see it, the central question here – asked explicitly near the end – is what are we entitled to do to the people we love. That’s different from the more conventional question of what we owe the people we love. This is more about the limits of what we can impose on people whom we come to feel “owe” us something for the concern we have shown them.

This gets at such concerns by exploring two threads of narrative in the life of our central character and narrator. In one of those threads, she establishes a friendship with a mixed race girl of her own age, and the two of them grow up learning to dance. Over time, it becomes clear that Tracy is not at all a good friend. She manipulates the narrator, takes advantage of the narrator’s family, and ultimately double crosses her.

In the other, the narrator goes to work for an Australian pop star who is a beloved international figure of her childhood. Aimee is usually a mostly likeable narcissist, a privileged star who assumes everyone is as concerned about her happiness as she is.

The two threads eventually intersect, but there’s a long stretch of narrative awkwardness as Smith bounces from one to the next, using flashbacks throughout even though the Aimee thread takes place mostly after the Tracy. And, when they do finally connect, the payoff falls short of justifying the tension Smith has worked to create.

SPOILER: The book opens with an ominous note from Tracy in which she gloats that everyone will now know what a whore Tracy is. Hundreds of pages later, though, we learn our narrator has slept with Aimee’s boyfriend, but it isn’t in especially whorish fashion, and she forgives Tracy in any case. That is, we don’t gain that much through the delayed revelation. It just feels complicated for the sake of complication.

That’s ultimately too bad because the core question is compelling. Tracy is as awful as she is because she sees herself loving the narrator and her family. She’s jealous of the narrator’s having an attentive father, and she sets out to torpedo that in part because she feels her own love entitles her. In the conclusion, which is a bit abrupt, the narrator seems to understand that deep truth at last, and she forgives Tracy, or at least sees herself as entitled to continue loving her old friend on her own terms.

The opposite plays out with Aimee. The narrator eventually wants to help save Aimee from using a Caribbean native as her one-sided fling. When she’s confronted with the harsh truth that she is nothing but an employee, an employee with a confidentiality agreement no less, she lashes out in public revenge. She discover that the fundamental nature of her relationship with Aimee means that she could never love her in the way the much more fraught relationship with Tracy makes possible. She cannot finally reconcile with Aimee because they were never really friends and never really in a position to love one another. Even though their relationship was better than the one with Tracy, it was always shaped by capital rather than personal impulse.

The prose, characters, and psychological insight are all top tier throughout, so I’ll be looking for more Smith down the road. Given the ways the narrative over-complicates this, though, I think it’s a notch below White Teeth.


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