Click here to subscribe today or Login.
My senior writing seminar in college focused on “New Writers,” the rising literati that included authors like Jonathan Safron Foer and Dave Eggers. The professor decided that instead of reading these writers’ acclaimed first novels, we would read their more disappointing second books.
It was in this class that I was introduced to Zadie Smith, a British novelist whose first book, “White Teeth,” was auctioned to publishers based on a partial manuscript. The book was finished while Smith was at Cambridge and was a best-seller immediately when released. Of course, in my class, we read her second book, “The Autograph Man,” which I wasn’t a fan of.
Years later, I picked up “White Teeth” and finally understood what all the Zadie Smith hype was about. Subsequently, I read “On Beauty,” which I loved. When “Swing Time” came out earlier this year, I was eager to dive into another of Smith’s intelligent and enjoyable novels.
Unfortunately, “Swing Time” fell into the more disappointing category.
The novel is narrated by an unnamed young woman who, in the present time, is the assistant to a famous pop singer, Aimee. She spends 10 years following Aimee from country to country, indulging in the artist’s every whim and essentially living Aimee’s life, rather than her own.
In her own life, the narrator struggles to form an identity. She grew up in the council estates of North London where she took dance lessons with a girl named Tracey, who, like the narrator, was the product of a mixed-race relationship. Tracey had talent and ambition. As the two girls grew older, their lives diverged dramatically.
The narrator went on to college and an entry level job, while Tracey attended theater school and landed some gigs as a dancer. Periodically, they cross paths with one another, but once the narrator lands the job with Aimee, she leaves her old London life behind entirely.
When the novel opens, Aimee plans to create a school for girls in a poor village in Africa. The narrator believes that as a (half) black woman, she will connect deeply with her African sisters. She does, with a young woman named Hawa, but she is dismayed to learn that the women in the village see her as white.
This concept shifts her identity. In fact, the narrator doesn’t seem to have much of her own identity. Who she is depends upon who she is with and where she is. With Tracey, she is the dancer, the lover of musicals. With her cold, driven mother, she is the disappointing daughter. With Aimee, she is merely a sidekick.
When her job with Aimee implodes toward the end of the novel, she comes full circle back to Tracey who leaks a childhood video intended to damage the narrator. She includes a note, “Now everyone knows who you really are.”
By the end of the novel, I did not have more of an idea of who the narrator was than I did at the beginning. Tracey, Aimee and the mother came alive as characters (although Aimee was quite stereotypical), but I didn’t get attached to the narrator.
The book switches back and forth between the narrator’s childhood with Tracey and the present time with Aimee. The past chapters were reflective of Smith’s talents with writing. The present sections were dull and dragged until the end when everything came to a head.
I did enjoy the past sections, particularly when the narrator was with Tracey, but as a whole, I found this novel boring. Do yourselves a favor: pick up “White Teeth” and skip this one. It isn’t worth the time it took me to read.
