Zadie Smith for those who stay

“Zadie Smith dislikes the words the end

There are all kinds of opening lines, first paragraphs you’ll remember forever, books that come to life only in the presence of a reader. And then you have books that begin in medias res, those where, by the time you got there, the show had inevitably started.

Zadie Smith’s novels definitely fall within the latter category: you open the door and stumble upon a suicide attempt, a stuffy Saturday afternoon or “the first day of my humiliation”; you read an email addressed to someone else, or find out there is an Embassy of Cambodia. You may as well shut the door and leave: that world, those characters, were there before you, and will carry on existing regardless.

Illustration by Davide Baroni for Pixarthinking

1.

It’s a late September afternoon; out there, England has the smiling edges of an out of focus, yet unthreatening picture, like one of those guys you meet at a party and keep telling each other you should go for a coffee, and then the party’s over, the hangover fades and nothing else happens.

It’s on that afternoon — blurry edges, unfamiliar country — that I meet Zadie Smith. In hindsight, I’d like to read some sort of sign in that first encounter, romanticise the reasons behind the purchase of my first book in England. The truth, though, is that what really attracted me to On Beauty was its cover.

Just a few months later, in February, I catch a train to New Cross, the final stop of the now-defunct East London line, stepping out to see houses with walled windows and uneven pavements. It’s a sunny morning, and Sainsbury’s is selling the first strawberries of the season.

England, in the meantime, has acquired edges as sharp as they are hard to grasp, revealing a long series of tics and codes and unspoken rules, like the guy from the party once you actually do go for that coffee and, both sober, find out you’ve got nothing in common.

England, in the meantime, has acquired edges as sharp as they are hard to grasp, revealing a long series of tics and codes and unspoken rules, like the guy from the party once you actually do go for that coffee and, both sober, find out you’ve got nothing in common.

Perhaps things would be different if, on that September afternoon, I had bought White Teeth instead; maybe London’s zones Two and Three wouldn’t feel so unfamiliar. Six months later I will move there, some years later I’ll recognise some of its traits in the neighbourhood described in White Teeth, in spite of it being literally on the other side of town (the novel’s north-west, I’m south-east). Ten years later, the same stop is a gentrifiers’ hotspot, where the Turkish off-licence and Afro hairdresser strenuously survive beside the hipster café, with its cold-brewed Ethiopian blend dripped for fifty-six hours -not a minute less! -, and don’t you even dare asking for some sugar.

2.

Zadie Smith writes about London with the innate authority of someone who was born there, and as such, doesn’t need to prove anything. Her London doesn’t have the suburban aftertaste you find in some of Hanif Kureishi’s characters, it does not exist in relation to something; it isn’t a conquest, it’s a matter of fact.

Part of that nonchalance is given by Smith’s apparent knack for capturing and reproducing voices, accents, inflections. She’s a ventriloquist and a diapason, mixing cockney and patois, slang and lines borrowed from the ads.

Part of that nonchalance is given by Smith’s apparent knack for capturing and reproducing voices, accents, inflections. She’s a ventriloquist and a diapason, mixing cockney and patois, slang and lines borrowed from the ads.
She makes one of her characters say, not entirely without disdain, that another one sports a Kilburn facelift, known south of the river as a Croydon facelift and everywhere else — unless of course you live in a place where actual facelifts can be afforded — as the kind of bun where hair is pulled back so tight, it makes wrinkles disappear.

These voices and interior monologues are constantly changing, like those of many shop assistants on Oxford Street, who code-switch from a slang-heavy, Saaf London accent to a more formal one according to their audience. In a country where every detail is a more or less explicit indicator of the class you belong to, a wrong accent would sound jarring, out of place.

It’s not by chance that Tracey, the narrator’s best friend and antagonist in Swing Time, takes elocution classes to get rid of her accent and acquire a more refined one, and it’s not by chance that Smith stresses the rhythms and nuances in her characters’ voices: a neutral, BBC accent could only seem contrived in the novelist’s London, which acts as both the background and the counterpart to their stories. As much a protagonist as they are, the city is responsible, with its architectures and geographies, for much of their identities. They are Londoners by chance or choice (although often someone else’s), just as the thousands I cross every day, and yet so peculiar in their idiosyncrasies, like the boroughs that have seen them come to life.

Willesden, Kilburn, Kensal Green. From a bus window, they all look the same, these neighbourhoods “just minutes away from the city centre by Tube!” Their singularities are slowly revealed through the details: the lettering of the street names, the colours of the recycling bins, the bus routes, the ethnic minorities that populate them. Semidetached houses and council estates stand beside kebab places and shops with oddly shaped vegetables, and then, behind the corner, the unexpected solemnity of four-storey Victorian mansions. In this sense, London never changes, always true to itself. What makes each neighbourhood unique is the way those switches occur, the rhythm of those juxtapositions.

3.

Talking about London when you weren’t born there means constantly having to deal with a mythical before. Before Brexit, before the Olympics, before the riots. Before recession, before Peckham became a place where to have fancy cocktails. It means constantly having to face those who were there before you, who managed to see the real London — whatever that means — and can talk about it better than you.

It’s the London of legends, kept alive through expats’ tales, where “you found a job in a week, and rooms in Shoreditch were dirt cheap, and Christ, do you remember the squat in that Hackney warehouse where they peed in bottles?” It’s a crescendo that piles up on the images of a clichéd London, red buses and black cabs, Beatles and Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper and Charles Dickens, the Royal family and Victorian atmospheres, afternoon tea and punks on King’s Road.

Trying to piece that city together, now, is almost like trying to remember the way a language sounded before you’d actually learnt it.

Trying to piece that city together, now, is almost like trying to remember the way a language sounded before you’d actually learnt it. When did that imaginary London, made up of images from tourist leaflets and scraps of pop culture, get smashed against the insistence of Jehovah’s witnesses knocking on your door, the Polish corner shop or the chicken bones spat out on the pavement? When did that version of London stop existing, the one that’s probably real only for those who’ve never been there? Perhaps it vanished on the same day my auntie stopped asking me if I’d ever seen the Queen.

4.

A recurring topic in Zadie Smith’s novels is fate, not so much as predestination — most of her characters are anything but epic, and even when they try to be, they fail impressively — but rather as chance, the arbitrariness of existence, against which nothing can really be done. The best example is Archie Jones’ penchant for flipping a coin before any decision in White Teeth, the modus operandi of a character for whom forging one’s destiny is just out of the question.

It’s a theme that emerges in the following novels too: in NW, the friendship between Leah and Natalie is held up by chance, starting from their first encounter, when they’re four years old and Natalie saves Leah from drowning in a swimming pool. It’s an important detail, which Natalie — formerly known as Keisha — loves to remember, seeing in it the first traces of her tenacity and willingness to build herself a future that will take her away from her council estate.

Predestination comes back in the dialogue that closes the novel, where Natalie’s and Leah’s different ideas of fate are revealed: one is convinced she deserves everything she has, the other incredulous in front of its blindness. “I just don’t understand why I have this life […] You, me, all of us. Why that girl and not us”.

This dilemma turns up again, almost identical, in Swing Time, which reprises many of NW’s themes. As she crosses the Hungerford Bridge, the protagonist-narrator thinks back of the two students who were mugged and thrown into the river below. One survives, the other doesn’t. “I never understood how the survivor managed it, in the darkness, in the absolute cold, with the terrible shock and his shoes on”. It’s a recurring thought, appearing in her mother’s memories as well. One survives, the other doesn’t. Why one and not the other. A reflection shared by many of Smith’s characters, but also one that echoes outside of her pages, especially in the aftermath of the attack on Westminster. Why her and not him. Why them and not us.

5.

Similarly to NW, Swing Time rotates around a female friendship with London on the background; here too fate plays a big role, putting together Tracey and the protagonist, two girls who are as similar as they are different. The first one is cheeky, charismatic, with an innate talent for dance, the latter a shy girl, whose name we’ll never find out.

Both the only daughters of a mixed couple, both brought up on an estate, their recognition of one another is a mutual, obvious matter: they’re the only two brown girls at their ballet class. In spite of her talent, Tracey will not be able to escape the single mother with three kids parable; the protagonist will instead become Aimée’s personal assistant, living in the shadow of a pop superstar for ten years, after having spent the previous twenty in her mother’s and her best friend’s ones.

Zadie Smith by Jan Postma, via Flickr

As mentioned earlier, Zadie Smith can reproduce the accents of her characters perfectly, gifting every single one with an unmistakable timbre, and switching from one to the next almost erratically, alternating writing styles and points of view, inside narration and omniscient storytelling, allowing things to slowly come together. Perhaps that’s what’s missing from Swing Time, a four hundred pages-long POV shot. Whether it’s about Tracey, Aimée or her own mother, the only voice we hear belongs to the protagonist. Maybe that’s Smith’s way to redeem her: and yet, she’s aware that she “always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow”, even when, it’s her voice, and only hers, that we listen to.

Maybe that’s Smith’s way to redeem her: and yet, she’s aware that she “always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow”, even when, it’s her voice, and only hers, that we listen to.

Curiously, Swing Time is the novel where the official London appears most frequently: Trafalgar Square, Westminster, the South Bank, the OXO tower and West End musicals. It’s the best-known and most impersonal version of London, nearly a simulacrum of itself, upon which anyone can project the narrative of their choice. It’s a canvas filled with connotations and yet pristine, it’s the London that most resembles the protagonist.

.

Zadie Smith dislikes the words the end. Or rather, Zadie Smith loves open endings, the kind where, if they were films, the end credits start rolling as the protagonists’ car drives away into the sunset. They’ll carry on with their lives — of course they will -, it’s just that we’ll never hear from them again.

When I got here, London had already started. Amongst the things I managed to see were a triple-dip recession, a coalition government and a Tory one, one referendum for Scottish independence, one Brexit and one terrorist attack. If Zadie Smith’s novels reflect the country’s mood in any way, we’re headed for an uncertain, disappointing finale. When I bump into the guy from the party, I just pretend not to know him; Archie Jones flipped his coin once again, and it’s tails.

This article was originally published on Pixarthinking on March 28th 2017, under the editorial direction of Mattia Coletti.

)

Chiara Puntil Sélavy

Written by

London-based writer and film programmer. Expendable Chapters is her latest project; subscribe at tinyletter.com/chiaraselavy to read all the issues.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade