Last week brother Miguel and I agreed to stop watching a horror movie after half an hour, for different reasons. I found the dialogue somewhat mannered, the atmosphere minimal, a minor role overacted. It plods. No soundtrack, either, or at least one that made any sort of impression—a shame, since in most cases I prefer them over the horror movies themselves. Miguel’s contention: “Too soon.” He was referring to the setting: lockdown during the worst days of the coronavirus. I suppose I haven’t been hungering for works of art that reflect on the period, which, despite what can seem like the willed amnesia of the outside world—too late!—we haven’t entirely left behind, and seeing it rendered as drama onscreen was rather jarring. It’s not that the subject is too touchy, or too weirdly fresh, to explore. What seemed too soon to me, given when the movie was released, was putting out anything other than the latest scientific information or the first draft of history from healthcare workers, essential workers, or journalists, processing and creating without distance on the subject. But I’m more inclined to think it’s a matter of quality rather than timing. Rushed artistic works that rely heavily on the tumultuous moment to garner interest aren’t welcome. Quality always is. During the same week it so happens I was also thinking about who the best essayists alive might be. With this question in mind, I considered those I didn’t know well enough to rank and one of the first names that came up was Zadie Smith.
I read her debut novel White
Teeth back in college, published when she wasn’t much older than I was at
the time. I didn’t warm to it, her youth showing in ways I didn’t find
appealing. Today her name is mentioned everywhere I go to sniff out books when
she isn’t being interviewed and published in some of those places. Having read
a recent piece of hers about Charles Dickens and her latest novel, I felt
fairly safe that she’d be a writer with style, a defibrillator aiding me in my
recovery from those without. I didn’t check the
reviews or even a summary before choosing to stick with the older Smith and ordering
a collection entitled Intimations (2020). Turns out we were reading Marcus Aurelius
at the same time and that Smith, in this book of six essays, is responding to
the start of the pandemic: “There will be many books written about the year
2020: historical, analytical, political, as well as comprehensive accounts.
This is not any of those—the year isn’t halfway done.” The subject was
processed and the book expressly created without distance.
The first essay of the collection,
“Peonies,” begins with an image likely to resonate with many who survived our plague, the writer clutching
iron bars. We learn that Smith is strict in her scheduling: 45 minute blocks,
with two minutes in between reserved for “free time.” A charming series of
sentences:
In those days, the sharp end of my
spade was primed against chatty baristas, overly friendly mothers, needy
students, curious readers—anyone I considered a threat to the program. Oh, I
was very well defended. But this was a sneak attack…by horticulture. Tulips.
Eventually I came to think of it as somewhat
risky for an opening essay. I started going over my notes and expanding on them
and referring back to it as soon as I finished, which amounted to a second
reading, simply because the form she chooses makes it tough to follow, unlike
the rest of her essays. One association leads to another and another and
another: the bars, Nabokov’s tale about the origin of Lolita (she
doesn’t buy it), a Freudian analysis of the image of a middle-aged woman
peering at a flower, the cage of gender…. The torrent of experience overwhelms
Smith. Our first disagreement: I enjoy getting carried away, trusting that I’ll
have quiet, solitary hours to retrieve memories to fondle or laugh about.
(Although it’s easier for me to preserve my solitude than a
mother/wife/professor.) The method of the essay I’m most used to is orderly, thesis
and support, problem and possible answer, struggle and resolution. Here, Smith
rejects it, instead pulling the reader into the convolutions of her struggle: “If
only it were possible to simply state these feelings without insisting on them,
without making an argument or a dogma out of them!” What I hear is: the writer
is going to present thoughts that aren’t properly worked out or omitted as
facile before being committed to the page, that their importance lies in merely
having been thought. And, right on cue, she presents one that’s shaky and
disputable. The reader could argue with her but she ends the essay by saying
that all these thoughts could be nonsense anyway. So why bother? Let’s say it works
best as an introduction to the mind of Zadie Smith.
Another essay takes on a classic
subject, “why I write” or “why write?” In response to the numerous attempts she
views as inaccurate or dishonest, she attempts to get at the real reason and what
she produces is one of the least convincing I’ve come across on this theme. The
real reason she claims to write is to fill time: “There is no great difference
between novels and [baking] banana bread. They are both just something to do.” One
can read this as suicidal: a warning that there’s no life or urgency whatsoever
behind what you write. And, ugh! banana bread! My admittedly scant knowledge of
Smith’s work won’t let me accept that interpretation. As I puzzled over an
alternative, she does what I seek the essayist to do: she interrogates that
thought, allowing that there are writers who take another approach without sacrificing
authenticity. Ultimately Smith finds solace in all those who are also, due to
the pandemic, searching for ways of filling time. But why fill your time with
writing when there are so many less complicated, low-impact ways of doing that?
One could: play video games, bingewatch shows, browse around on the internet,
lie around in bed, masturbate. All narcotizing diversions that would make for a
comfortable life completely devoid of the pains of deep thinking and reflection
and the careful weighing of words. It must be because, for a writer of any sort
of merit, there’s more to it than mere time-filling. I wouldn’t go so far as to
call “Something to Do” nonsense but one measure of the best essayists is how
well the writer probes the subject at hand, which partly involves anticipating the
sensible objections of those readers who are particularly keen to test
durability. These two essays have their cracks.
And there are a few more throughout. Otherwise
I appreciate everything about Intimations. It’s a slim book but nonetheless
she views the pandemic from a satisfying number of angles. In her collection of
“screengrabs,” we step outside her head as she observes, in a series of short
pieces, various people in her life and how they seem to be coping. One quality
I imagine serves her well as a novelist is her special attention to people, the
feeling she conveys that she’s looking just a little closer, to better
individualize someone. Smith on her masseur:
His head
and face is optimistic in construction. He looks like optimism. Both his
skull and his face are ideally round, he is always smiling, and he makes
baldness look like an achievement, like something to be perfected. His skin is
the color of old paperback pages.
She does some admirable self-questioning of her privilege and her degree of suffering. She’s cool as opposed to heated, even when she’s writing about power structures and the contempt displayed by those in power, refreshingly free of stridency and dogma, the standard mode for many. She’s vulnerable, candid. Compared to her, I gradually felt myself to be—rough! Like an expanse of dry skin before it’s magically transformed by a drop of lotion (in commercials). Lately I’ve been meditating on the word “acerbic.” The other day I was looking in the mirror, thinking about the book and brushing my teeth, when my jaw dropped: “Acerbic”? Gwog? Smith provides, through humble example, the gentlest inducement to productive self-questioning.
Once I started Intimations, I didn’t think about whether it was too soon or not. After the last piece, a list of people she’s thankful for, with commentary, I realized that I’d formed, pixel by unobtrusive pixel, from her reading tastes to her opinions to her routine to her background, a vivid image of the book’s affable main character, Zadie Smith, who enters a clothing store and leaves with a personalized t-shirt that reads: “Black Nerd.”
