FEEL FREE
Essays
By Zadie Smith
452 pp. Penguin Press. $28.
As a teenager, Zadie Smith discovered Hanif Kureishi's novel "The Buddha of Suburbia" and felt her world crack open. Kureishi, who is British-Pakistani, made his narrator and protagonist, Karim, mixed race as well. Smith, the child of a black Jamaica-born mother and a white British father, wasn't used to seeing biracial characters in fiction. "Practically the only star I had to steer by was that old, worn-out, paper-thin character the 'tragic mulatto,'" she writes in her latest collection of essays, "Feel Free," "whom I found in bad novels and worse movies." But Karim wasn't tragic, nor was he an idealized, anodyne role model. He was, in Smith's words, "pushy, wild, charismatic, street-smart, impudent, often hilarious."
Kureishi isn't interested in pieties, and neither, refreshingly, is Smith, as anyone who has read her essays in Harper's, The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books knows. Smith argues that it is Kureishi's willingness to be impious, perverse and rude that gives the novel its singular power: "All the great energy of 'Buddha' comes from watching the liberty of creative freedom being taken, over and over again — as if it were a right." Which, of course, it is. But that's not always obvious to young artists, particularly those who don't see themselves represented in the status quo. Reading the novel, Smith "felt something impossible loosen within me," she writes in "The I Who Is Not Me," the inaugural Philip Roth Lecture, which she delivered at the Newark Public Library in 2016. "It was a gift of freedom."
A few years after this formative moment, in 2000, she published "White Teeth," her celebrated debut novel. Smith has written four novels since then, and in the past decade, she has also produced a significant body of smart, incisive nonfiction, much of it occasioned by encounters with books and film and visual art, from Kureishi's novel to Balthasar Denner's 18th-century painting "Alte Frau" to Jordan Peele's film "Get Out." Although her essays range over many topics — Brexit, Facebook, climate change, cultural appropriation, pleasure versus joy — she is interested in the making and meaning of cultural artifacts, and in the exchange of feeling that takes place between art and its audience, between text and reader: what she calls "the essential, living communication between art work and viewer."
As the title of her new collection suggests, here Smith explores variations on a theme: freedom of language and thought; freedom from received narratives that tend to be foolishly consistent, if not downright constricting; freedom from the "impossible identities" society so facilely places on people, or from those we too readily adopt ourselves. Most of all, though, she's concerned with artistic and aesthetic freedom, with the boldness and daring that compel an artist to create even when conditions seem hostile. In 1969, she notes, it was a radical act for a Jewish author to write a foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed, masturbating character like Alexander Portnoy. But in "taking this freedom for himself," Smith writes, Roth, "intentionally or not, passed that freedom down" to readers and writers like Smith, who came after him.
Freedom is a conceit well suited to a collection of essays. Aldous Huxley called the essay "a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything" — and this is Smith's approach. She writes about her lower-middle-class upbringing by way of the second bathroom in her childhood home: "The spare room, the extra toilet — these represented, for my parents, a very British form of achievement." She mourns her father while celebrating the exhilarating democracy of Italian public parks, and she explores Justin Bieber as love-object through the philosophy of Martin Buber. The essay form's freewheeling nature arguably accounts for its current popularity. Readers, hip to the conventions of storytelling — we fill our commutes with podcasts and fetishize long-form narratives — are drawn to the essay, which lends itself to the unexpected and original. Behind the best contemporary essays you can sense the writer's beating heart.
Smith's style is casual, discursive, but not collagelike in the current fashion, intimate without being overly personal. Taking her children to "The Polar Express 4-D Experience" on the same day she sees Charlie Kaufman's puppet film, "Anomalisa" — while carrying a pocket book of Schopenhauer around — yields "Windows on the Will: 'Anomalisa,'" an essay that examines Kaufman's film through its Schopenhauerian fixation on human suffering (the easier to dramatize with puppets): "the inevitability of it, and the possibility of momentary, illusory relief from it." Similarly, in "Man Versus Corpse," the discovery of a "forlorn little hardbacked book" about Italian masterpieces on a table in her lobby leads to a close reading of Luca Signorelli's painting "Nude Man From the Back Carrying a Corpse on His Shoulders," which in turn opens up into a rambling discussion of existence, inequality ("the unequal distribution of corpses"), Rothko, Warhol ("an enthusiastic proponent of corpse art"), iPhones and her own inability to imagine herself as a corpse, before ending at a dinner party with talk of Knausgaard and his multivolume "cathedral of boredom."
It is exquisitely pleasurable to observe Smith thinking on the page, not least because we have no idea where she's headed. "Notes on Attunement," her well-known essay on Joni Mitchell, recounts the sudden epiphany that took her from "Joni Mitchell-hating pilgrim" to a fan who weeps with joy at her music, touching on Wordsworth, connoisseurship, Seneca, Kierkegaard and the inconsistency of the self along the way. At times she reminds me of a musician jamming, or one of those enviable cooks who can take five random ingredients lying around the kitchen and whip up a meal. Her loose, roving essays cohere because they are rooted in her sensibility, in what Elizabeth Hardwick called "the soloist's personal signature flowing through the text."
How to characterize Smith's sensibility? Above all, she's allergic to dishonesty, hypocrisy, sanctimony, cant. "For many people in London right now," she writes in "Fences: A Brexit Diary," "the supposedly multicultural and cross-class aspects of their lives are actually represented by their staff — nannies, cleaners — by the people who pour their coffees and drive their cabs, or else the handful of Nigerian princes you meet in private schools." She takes a wide-lens, Olympian view, often empathizing with both sides of an issue — her arguments can thus be difficult to pinpoint — but she is ultimately pragmatic. "One useful consequence of Brexit," she writes, "is to finally and openly reveal a deep fracture in British society that has been 30 years in the making."
At root she believes that art is a realm where knotty issues can be safely explored, and that we should not draw neat boundaries around its subjects. Such is the argument of her much-discussed essay on "Get Out," which first appeared in Harper's: It's a fantasy that "we can get out of each other's way, mark a clean cut between black and white," she concludes in that essay, which also examines the controversy over the white artist Dana Schutz's painting of Emmett Till. In an open letter, the artist Hannah Black had asked the Whitney Biennial to remove and destroy the painting, on the grounds that Schutz had no right to depict black suffering; the request, Smith writes, was "the province of Nazis and censorious evangelicals." The problem with such racial essentialism, she suggests elsewhere in this collection, is that it can run both ways. See the narrow, patronizing tendency to "ascribe to black artists some generalized aim," like "inserting the black figure into the white canon." This trivializes the formal and technical concerns of the artist, Smith writes, "the unique problem each art work poses."
Smith is an appreciator of art, a connoisseur, rather than a stern critic. It's rare that she writes about anything she dislikes. Indeed, if the book has a subtheme, it is joy, a feeling not often discussed outside of New Age circles. It's an emotion brought about by giving birth, falling in love, taking drugs — those almost unbearably exquisite experiences that the final essay, "Joy," recounts — but also by art: Joni Mitchell's music, Fred Astaire's dancing, the defiantly campy street strut of the man in Marc Bradford's video "Niagara."
Of course, as Smith notes in her foreword, the idea of freedom has taken on new resonance in the past year, and I have often heard it asked whether art that is not expressly political is still necessary or worthwhile. But as Smith writes: "You can't fight for a freedom you've forgotten how to identify." Art — making it, contemplating it — reminds us what it's like to feel free.
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