intimations by zadie smith

the i paper 30 july 2020

Let’s get envy out of the way first. While many of us struggled to achieve anything during the first weeks of lockdown, barely baking a loaf of banana bread or completing a workout with Joe Wicks, Zadie Smith managed to write a whole book. It is a very slim book – 82 pages; six essays – but it’s a book, nonetheless. Anyone who feels piqued that this might be a money-spinner, though, should note that the author’s royalties are being donated to charity. Besides, Smith generously suggests that writing is simply something to do, no better or worse than baking, sewing a dress or completing “all the levels on Minecraft”.

These essays have been written from the standpoint of an impassioned reader. This is not new territory for Smith, who declared in an earlier collection of essays, Changing My Mind (2009), that: “Reading has always been my passion, my pleasure, and I am constitutionally drawn to any thesis that gives power to readers, increasing their freedom of movement.” The pandemic found Smith reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations in the same way she would “the instructions for a flat-pack table – I was in need of practical assistance”.

In “Suffering like Mel Gibson”, she elegantly explores the idea that the “misery is very precisely designed, and different for each person”, articulating what many felt during lockdown: almost everyone else had a more enviable situation. Smith argues for more compassion to our own suffering and the suffering of others, if only to make Zoom calls more tolerable. “Suffering is not relative; it is absolute,” she writes. “Suffering has an absolute relation to the suffering individual – it cannot be easily mediated by a third term such as ‘privilege’. If it could, the CEO’s daughter would never starve herself, nor the movie idol ever put a bullet in his own brain.”

Elsewhere, at a London bus stop, she encounters a woman who remembers her from childhood and complains that, at 58, she has not yet menopaused. Smith is entranced by this “symbol of a certain uncontained and uncontainable fecundity”, possibly because as a child, the author thought, “I’d rather be a brain in a jar than a ‘natural woman’”. She finds herself now an odd combination of the two and reflects that while she is perimenopausal and her children are no longer babies, “if I hear a strange baby cry, some part of me still leaps to attention”. She also points out that while women may become spinsters, crones, babes, MILFs or simply “childless”, men remain men.

Smith is unsparing on the iniquities of American healthcare. “Death comes to all – but in America it has long been considered reasonable to offer the best chance of delay to the highest bidder.” She also describes contempt as a virus and devastatingly elucidates the contempt American society has for black bodies, touching not just on George Floyd but also on Amy Cooper, a white woman who recently called the police on a black man who asked her to leash her dog in Central Park.

Amidst all this gravity, there is still space for Smith’s wry humour, advising that if you see a man holding a sign that reads “COME ASK ME ABOUT PALESTINE. (Don’t ask him about Palestine.)” Smith’s publishers have described these essays as possessing a “profound intimacy” and while it seems cheap to unquestioningly swallow a marketing line, I would have to agree. Smith has the gift that she attributed to Nabokov, years ago, of making any reader of her work feel they are engaged in a creative act, discovering the felicities of her writing. As she said, one feels “They are so hard to see, such particular details, that you feel you placed them there yourself.”

This review first appeared in the i paper