October 5, 2020

zadie smith on writing essays

The unseen actors who harvest this knowledge not only hope to know us perfectly but also to modify us, to their own ends. Whenever I spent time with my pious Uncle Ricky, and the moment came for everyone around the table to bow their heads, close their eyes, and thank God for a plate of escovitch fish, I could all too easily convince myself that I, too, was a witness of Jehovah. She does this, not with grand statements, but intimate sketches of the people that inhabit the peripherals of her life. To give a concrete example: if the Pakistani girl next door happened to be painting mehndi on my hands—she liked to use me for practice—it was the work of a moment to imagine I was her sister. In front of a book you are still free. Scientific examinations of the virus, stories focused on New York hospital's response in the early months of the pandemic, speculative fictions, alternate histories, intersectional narratives and more. It gave me a new way of thinking, and it made so much se. She's so good and this is way too short. i'm feeling very quiet right now, so i don't have much to say but i'm glad smith wrote and published these. I love Zadie Smith. I’m sure I’m not the first novelist to dig up that old Whitman chestnut in defense of our indefensible art. Our autobiographical coordinates rarely matched. The question is: Do we know what fiction was? Though you wouldn’t know it to look at him, he’s probably more “like me” than any character I ever created. More poor people are dying than rich. Alex-Li is a weird, nerdy, obsessive, melancholy type of guy. Maybe, maybe not. I once wrote a novel about an imaginary, multihyphenated British-Jewish-Chinese boy. And for years now, in the pages of novels, “I” have been both adult and child, male and female, black, brown, and white, gay and straight, funny and tragic, liberal and conservative, religious and godless, not to mention alive and dead. This was what fiction believed about itself, but like all beliefs not a little of it was always wishful thinking. There will be no shortage of books written about our current year. While we should expect a slew of historical and political analysis in the following years, writer Zadie Smith offers something more personal in her new essay collection, “Intimations.” The book contains six pieces on our current moment. And many a reader must surely have turned from White Teeth in exactly the same spirit. I just wish Zadie would get back to writing good fiction. I have closed novels and stared at their back covers for a long moment and felt known in a way I cannot honestly say I have felt known by many real-life interactions with human beings, or even by myself. ever since quarantine began, i have been bracing myself for the inevitable flood of memoirs i knew were gonna come out of it—everyone with their feels and reflections; those "now i know what's really important" realizations they felt needed to be shared beyond their social media platforms. And should they come at all? What all liberation movements want, surely, is comprehension and compassion. To see more, visit, slew of historical and political analysis. When of course they are only, like all language, a verbal container, which, like all such containers, allows the emergence of certain ideas while limiting the possibilities of others. (It’s also given us a marvelous, separate literature that has no interest in human selves of any kind—which is concerned instead with animals, trees, extraterrestrials, inanimate objects, ideas, language itself.) This presumption does not assume it is “correct,” no more than I assumed, when I depicted the lives of a diverse collection of people in my first novel, that I was “correct.” But I was fascinated to presume that some of the feelings of these imaginary people—feelings of loss of homeland, the anxiety of assimilation, battles with faith and its opposite—had some passing relation to feelings I have had or could imagine. But we can never be entirely certain. This in no way meant that fiction had to be about all the people—it very rarely was—but only that the identity, sensibilities, and feelings of the reader could never be entirely known, controlled, or predetermined.

All storytelling is the invitation to enter a parallel space, a hypothetical arena, in which you have imagined access to whatever is not you.

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