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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Zadie Smith changes mind, and that's not a bad thing

Reviewed by: Alison Gillmor

Posted: 11/28/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

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British author Zadie Smith looks back on a decade of magazine and newspaper work. (AP PHOTO)

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Changing My Mind

Occasional Essays

By Zadie Smith

Hamish Hamilton, 256 pages, $32

British writer Zadie Smith essentially grew up in public, exploding onto the literary scene at the enviable age of 25, when her debut novel, White Teeth, won The Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

In this vivacious collection of essays, the 34-year-old looks back at a decade of magazine and newspaper work and finds her ideas changeable and inconsistent.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. In Changing My Mind, Smith favours risky failure over comfy success and prefers imperfect practice to crystalline theory. (Smith's still unpublished book on writing is titled Fail Better.)

Take her reconsideration of George Eliot's 1872 novel Middlemarch. The young Henry James felt the book was "too copious," too messy, too crammed with irrelevant detail.

But for Smith, this too muchness is glorious: Eliot has left behind the hard moral clarity of youth and embraced the human condition in all its flawed and floundering richness. Middlemarch works, Smith suggests, because Eliot "thought with her heart and felt with her head."

This process describes Smith's own criticism, which is ardent, analytical and often unexpected. Smith's evaluation of E.M. Forster -- her third novel, On Beauty, owes a structural debt to Forster's Howards End -- acknowledges his reputation as a mild middlebrow.

But she also finds in Forster's honesty, flexibility and modest humanism a peculiarly British form of intellectual power. Meanwhile, in an essay titled Franz Kafka: Everyman, she reconsiders Kafka by emphasizing not his strange middle-European surrealism but his reassuringly quotidian qualities. (He was famously punctual, for instance. Who knew?)

The essays in Changing My Mind, mostly prompted by the set subjects and hard deadlines of journalism, range from Hollywood teen movies to French structuralism.

Smith tackles it all with a tone that's both whip-smart and conversational. She writes passionately and generously about books, of course, but she also loves cinema.

(In a worshipful obituary of the beautiful, imperious, trouser-wearing Katharine Hepburn, Smith admits to bouncing lovers out of her bed after disagreements about the Hepburn-Tracy film Adam's Rib.)

One of the book's loveliest pieces is a tender account of the death of Smith's father, whose comically morose approach to life was summed up in his habitual phrase, "No good can come of this."

Smith -- who was born to a white English father and a Jamaican mother -- also uses her family background to explore knotty issues of class, race and identity.

In Speaking in Tongues, she talks about the shift in her accent as she shed the glottal stops of her multicultural, working-class north London neighbourhood and took on the posh rounded tones of Cambridge.

She also writes -- with clear fellow feeling -- of U.S. President Barack Obama, saying that he comes from a place where "everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That's how you get from your mother to your father, from talking to one set of folks who think you're not black enough to another who figure you insufficiently white."

Smith's non-fiction writing is never tentative -- it shares the tough, funny, even fierce voice of her fiction -- but it is open-ended. These far-ranging essays are a potent reminder of the value of changing one's mind.

Winnipeg journalist Alison Gillmor plans to re-read Middlemarch.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 28, 2009 H8

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