This review was commissioned and published by the New Zealand Listener in May 2018.
In the foreword to her collection of essays, Feel Free, Zadie Smith starts with her anxiety about this artform. “It’s true that for years I’ve been … wondering if I’ve made myself ludicrous … Essays about one person’s affective experience have, by their very nature, not a leg to stand on. All they have is their freedom.” Including the freedom to be of wildly varying quality.
Smith’s insecurity pulses throughout the book. A lot of the essays in Feel Free are works of criticism: of books, films, and artworks. Some are the texts of talks Smith has given, often while receiving awards for her writing. Some are personal essays reflecting on Smith’s life as a woman who grew up poor in North London with a black mother and a white father, and who is now a successful middle-class writer teaching on a prestigious MFA course in the US, and what that transition means. As with Smith’s novels, themes of immigration, racism, multi-culturalism, and feminism abound.
The essays I liked the best – and at her best Smith is truly excellent – were the ones where she addresses a central uncertainty that is worrying her. In “The I Who Is Not Me” Smith considers why she avoided writing fiction in the first person until her latest novel, Swing Time, whose protagonist’s life in some ways resembles Smith’s own. “It became important for me to believe my fiction was about other people, rather than myself, I took a strange pride in this idea, as if it proved I was less self-preoccupied or vain than the memoirist or the blogger or the Bildungsroman-er. No one could accuse me of hubris if I wasn’t there.” But then Smith is inspired by Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint: “By saying ‘I’ in a certain mode, an ambivalent, fictional mode, Roth made possible through Portnoy a new kind of ‘I’ in the world, a gift of freedom … The offer was not: You, too, can be like Portnoy. The offer was: Portnoy exists! Be as you please.”
The essays I liked the least were the ones where Smith seems to be trying to cover up her insecurity with intellectualism. From an exhibition review: “For us, the image-map that has been made of the world is not exactly the same as the territory itself, or rather, we can still remember — if only vaguely — a moment in time when the seams were still partially visible.” When Smith writes in this impersonal, academic style, often leaning towards pomposity, I found my interest waning.
My favourite kinds of book reviews to read are enthusiastic ones, where the reviewer dives headlong into a work they admire and holds up to the light all their favourite parts to share. Smith reviews the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn: “Writing reviews, you spend quite a lot of your time typing out the sentences of other people, i.e. quoting. Usually this is dull work; with St Aubyn, it’s a joy. Oh the semicolons, the discipline! Those commas so perfectly placed, so rhythmic, creating sentences loaded and blessed, almost o’erbrimmed, and yet sturdy, never in danger of collapse. It’s like fingering a beautiful swatch of brocade.”
The essays in Feel Free get much better as the book progresses, so I recommend starting at the back. Overall the book feels more like a compilation of all the non-fiction Smith happens to have written over the past few years, rather than a curated collection of her best essays. But the best bits of Feel Free are worth reading in order to spend time with Smith when she’s being vulnerable and honest. “I feel this – do you?”
