Zadie Smith has such a pleasant presence on the page that one only reluctantly abandons her. In Swing Time, her latest, her companionable voice will carry you for hundreds of pages. Even her description of the home of a depressed uncle is soaked in empathy: “It was a garden of abundance and decay: the tomatoes were too ripe, the marijuana too strong, woodlice were hiding under everything. Lambert lived all alone there, and it felt to me like a dying place.” The narrator, whom we meet as a young girl and follow into her early thirties, has no name. It’s easy to imagine she’s actually just Smith, that you have been lucky enough to befriend one of the world’s leading novelists and she is confiding in you. That Smith manages to work in that intimate way without revealing much of herself is her gift.
Of course, in Swing Time, the narrator is not Smith. She is a resident of a housing estate in 1980s London who meets and befriends a more outgoing and initially somewhat more blessed girl named Tracey. Their friendship is centered on dance class, about which both are passionate. But while the narrator and her friend both dream a future as professional dancers, only Tracey — whose beautifully arched feet contrast with the narrator’s flat ones — has a real shot. Their whole relationship is inflected with that kind of awe particular to friendships between young girls, the worship of a hero who is also a peer. It is an impression that lasts. “I was — I am — in awe of Tracey’s technique,” the narrator writes, with that emphasis on the present tense. “She knew the right time to do everything.”
Yet, in a tale as old as time, the narrator is actually the one who is destined to rise above her circumstances. She is the one who goes to university, gets glamorous jobs, and moves away to New York, for a time. She is also the one who will find that Tracey’s attempts to live out the dream of being a dancer are ultimately futile. In one of the novel’s last scenes, the narrator visits the adult Tracey and finds “an anxious, heavy-set, middle-aged woman in terrycloth pajama bottoms.” This moment occasions a classic instance of female aggressiveness: “I looked so much younger,” the narrator thinks. It’s the closest Swing Time ever comes to cliché.
It is hard to know if Smith was aware of the echoes of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels in her setup. Certainly Swing Time could, like Ferrante’s books, be characterized as a novel about female friendship, albeit one inflected by race — both the narrator and Tracey are black. Of course, the result is not so simple. The narrator eventually abandons Tracey and moves on to a job as a personal assistant to an aging pop singer not entirely unlike Madonna. This opens up all sorts of fresh thematic angles: Charity, class, and celebrity all get their turn, too, at the helm of this elegant ship Smith has constructed.
Sailing is a useful metaphor for the way feel of reading Swing Time; Smith keeps things moving at a steady, elegant pace, but the journey remains all on one plane of experience. Never precisely a moralist, Smith isn’t very comfortable pushing her characters deep into the dilemmas they find entangling them, in the difficult questions the novel does seem to want to raise. This, perhaps, is true to the way people actually live, skimming the surface of meaning. But in a novel it can occasionally be unsatisfying. The narrator of Swing Time, when she comes to a reckoning with her celebrity boss late in the novel, acts impulsively. The novel knows it; another character tells her so. But such self-consciousness only makes us more curious about what a deep dive into the narrator’s motivations might have retrieved from the depths.
There is one exception: The trajectory of the narrator’s life has been set by her mother, also unnamed, who had always had greater ambitions for her own life than she was able to realize. She is not the sort of mother who had dreamed of taking on that role, not a mother who thought her whole existence would revolve around her only child. “She believed my father wanted more children in order to entrap her, and she was basically right about that, although entrapment in this case was only another word for love,” the narrator writes. Her mother’s highly individual style — “plain white linen trousers” and “frayed espadrilles,” “everything so plain, so understated, completely out of step with the spirit of the time,” is alternatively a source of pride and embarrassment for her daughter — a more common parent-child relationship than the world generally admits. The character is fascinating.
And in fact, unlike most of the people in this book, the narrator’s mother gradually gets some of what she wants: She gets a divorce. She gets herself educated. She becomes a local politician. She does not, not particularly, spend much time repairing her relationship with her daughter. Late in the book she tries to explain herself and the best she can offer, telling the narrator she’s lucky. “You don’t know how that feels because you’re lucky, really, you were born lucky, but I know.” At that moment the reader wants to know more of what the mother knows. But the book, its course charted, not wanting to interrupt its own rhythm, is ready to sail on.
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Sig Nordal 