Swing time smith5/22/2023 ![]() Clearly harmed by her proximity to fame, the narrator seems to provide Smith a means of critiquing all the attention she has received since her ascendance in the literary world at the age of 24. When we first encounter our narrator, who remains unnamed throughout, she’s encamped in a London flat, recently dismissed from her position as personal assistant to an Australian pop-star named Aimee. ![]() With her most recent novel, Swing Time, Smith continues her protean evolution by downplaying her characteristic humor and exploring the lives of her characters through a subjective first-person viewpoint, a technique she had not attempted until now. ![]() Forster’s Howards End, while NW (2012) refracted contemporary London through a gaze evoking Virginia Woolf - Smith’s vivacious, wide-roving, and often satirical perspective has consistently provided a stylistic through-line. ![]() ![]() Yet while her techniques and influences have indeed varied over time - On Beauty (2005), for example, paid homage to the domestic interplay of E.M. Ever since James Wood irritably classified Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth (2000) as “hysterical realism,” quite a lot of ink has been spilled praising or deriding the adaptability of her subsequent fiction. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |