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Zadie Smith is not only one of my favorite novelists to read, but one of favorite novelists to hear talk about being a novelist (she's like Jonathan Lethem that way). As I wrote in my Best of November review of her new collection of "occasional essays," Changing My Mind, it's been clear that she is a novelist from the moment she broke through with White Teeth in her early twenties, but what kind of novelist she is (or will become) seems open to change. I was always fascinated with her response to James Wood's sometimes harsh criticisms of her early work: without being either defensive or defenseless, she seemed to take his critique back home for consideration, and to look at her own work as something outside herself, something that doesn't define her and that she expects to move beyond.
She seems wonderfully open to absorbing influence, while retaining her core intelligence, warmth, and wit--that's clear from her novels, but also from her critical essays, which are not distant pronouncements or summaries, but almost physical engagements with her reading (or watching, as in the case of her movie reviews or her excellent pieces on Katherine Hepburn and the love of a particular kind of British comedy she shared with her father). When she writes a piece comparing two recent novels (Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Tom McCarthy's Remainder), it's as if she's trying both their styles of fiction on for herself (and one imagines part of her rougher treatment of Netherland is that it's closer to the kind of writing she's done in the past and wants to outgrow).
Her only essay in the collection that's directly about her own writing, "That Crafty Feeling," is one of my favorites, especially for the way she talks about her openness to influence. She acknowledges that some writers can't read other writers at all while they are working on their own books, but (also like Lethem) she's the opposite: "My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigor when I'm too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I'm syntactically uptight." And the influences extend from book to book:
Other people's words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people's words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you were going.
There's an ease to all of this river-crossing, it seems, just as there appears to be in her unfailing graceful sentences. But one of her further charms is that she's always looking to turn a story like that against itself, and so in her brilliant piece on Barack Obama and Pygmalion, she acknowledges the costs of such transformations through the words of others. She discusses her own hard-earned speaking voice, "the rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place," which was not the voice she grew up with. Thinking that she was adding a voice through her education, she has since found that she lost the other:
Recently my double voice has deserted me for a single one, reflecting the smaller world into which my work has led me. Willesden was a big, colorful, working-class sea; Cambridge was a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal; the literary world is a puddle. This voice I picked up along the way is no longer an exotic garment I put on like a college gown whenever I choose--now it is my only voice, whether I want it or not. I regret it; I should have kept both voices alive in my mouth.
Regrets or not, you get the feeling that her voice, along with her mind, will continue to change, in her novels as well as in these lovely, brilliant essays that are their equal. --Tom
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