Zadie Smith’s Swing Time: A Review of Emotion and Themes

I have a somewhat tough time with Zadie Smith. She’s obviously an excellent writer – with a wonderful flair for language and characterization. But still, I am not sure that she really works for me. I have so far read On Beauty (when it first came out) and now Swing Time. Both these books are good, but I still find it hard to get attached to the characters, get moved by them, and care deeply about what happens to them.

I felt this particularly with Swing Time because I started reading Shuggie Bain immediately afterward. And within 20 pages of Shuggie Bain, I found myself in all the feels and love/hate with the characters.

So, I want a book that transports me to the heights or depths of emotion. And it is what I look for, especially in a literary fiction read. Which Swing Time does not. I don’t think that’s Zadie Smith’s intention. It is a more intellectual type of book. And I appreciated it on an intellectual level, but I wasn’t transported by it.

About the Book

Two brown girls dream of being dancers—but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas about rhythm and time, black bodies and black music, and what constitutes a tribe or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.

~ Synopsys from goodreads

My Review

I thought the beginning sections were excellent. I could really relate to the protagonist and her relationship with her parents and her best friend. The connection between two mixed-race girls – one upwardly mobile and one lower-class (and not going anywhere) was beautifully brought about. Girlhood friendships are complicated with a good deal of competition and comparison, and Zadie Smith captures all these complexities perfectly.

Once the girls start to grow up and move on to their different lives, things start to falter a bit. At this stage, Smith chooses to drop the character building and focus on larger themes – race, gender, colonialism, capitalism, celebrity culture, dance theory, and more mishmash into a bit of a soup.

At some point while reading this book, I felt that the author had lost control of the plot – the focus, which I thought was a story about a friendship between two girls, moved on to a pop star’s philanthropic efforts in an unnamed African nation.

The narrator, who works for the pop star Aimée (very obviously based on Madonna), is scathing about her boss’ efforts and terms them misguided. But for all her criticism, she wasn’t doing anything spectacular herself. I am always annoyed by someone who complains or criticizes but doesn’t actually do any work in real life. And this annoys me in fiction as well. Our narrator does precious little throughout the novel – other than criticizing her mother (a woman who pulls herself out of poverty through education and hard work), her boss Aimée (another success story), who at least has good intentions, and basically everyone in the book.

I wish the narrator had enough self-awareness to see that the only thing she was bringing to the table was just a heaping boatload of negativity.

Still, once I got over the narrator acting as a mouthpiece for Smith’s own thoughts and views, I enjoyed the novel quite a bit – the Africa sections were actually charming, and I enjoyed all the secondary characters; everything was going well. But it was obvious that the entire charity setup had to implode, and I was looking forward to a deliciously fun confrontation between Aimée and our narrator.

Unfortunately, that was a damp squib. An even damper squib was her coming to terms with her fractured relationships with her parents and Tracey.

In the end, the whole thing was a bit of a damp squib. It was a pity because so much of the beginning and middle was brilliant! I can see why this book didn’t make the Man Booker shortlist in 2017 (even in a year of fairly weak books).

Have you read Swing Time? Did you like it?