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A review by nichecase
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
3.0
tracey bits > aimee bits > africa bits, though at the same time, i felt a bit like... ehh zadie you've done this whole "childhood friendship gets complicated" bit three times already. it's no surprise that it's good at this point! (for the record, zadie smith has been doing "best friend bildungsromans" since before it became a trend in bookselling.)
even though, to my estimation, this is her worst run-through of the theme, i can see how people would think it is a very, very good exploration of it: it goes to much darker places than smith has ventured before. no longer are friends ripped apart by semi-comic and semi-fantastic explorations of mouse cloning; now the inciting incident is something more akin to a long (and chronological) line of this was the most interesting part of the book to me - this strong line of fatalism running through it, fate caused by social forces and prophesied by activists and sociologists . it reminded me, in its own way, of a greek tragedy, and i wish it had been developed more as a coherent throughline and not just as scattered reflections on its more prominent (though still under-explored for my liking) motif of bad mothers.
the narration was also stale: smith's last four books have all had wonderfully wry omnipresent narrators in the tradition of forster, but this narrator was very much a blank wall in her narration (though she wasn't quit as much as a nothingness in her dialogue or characterisation). i think this kind of sapped the life out of much of the novel, because we were necessarily limited to her: the snippets of characterisation we find would, in a novel like [b:White Teeth|3711|White Teeth|Zadie Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1374739885s/3711.jpg|7480] be fleshed out into paragraph-long digressions on the eventual fate of the character. this novel lacked that, and didn't even have an enjoyable narrative voice to make up for that loss. (which is a shame because, alongside forster, one of smith's stated influences is nabokov, that master of the off-kilter first person narrator.)
even though, to my estimation, this is her worst run-through of the theme, i can see how people would think it is a very, very good exploration of it: it goes to much darker places than smith has ventured before. no longer are friends ripped apart by semi-comic and semi-fantastic explorations of mouse cloning; now the inciting incident is something more akin to a long (and chronological) line of
Spoiler
paranoid schizophrenia, pre-pubescent displays of sexuality, destruction of family members and blackmail.Spoiler
(in particular, the narrator's mother, who predicted that the narrator would do well and tracey would not, despite their best efforts to shuck off these labels)the narration was also stale: smith's last four books have all had wonderfully wry omnipresent narrators in the tradition of forster, but this narrator was very much a blank wall in her narration (though she wasn't quit as much as a nothingness in her dialogue or characterisation). i think this kind of sapped the life out of much of the novel, because we were necessarily limited to her: the snippets of characterisation we find would, in a novel like [b:White Teeth|3711|White Teeth|Zadie Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1374739885s/3711.jpg|7480] be fleshed out into paragraph-long digressions on the eventual fate of the character. this novel lacked that, and didn't even have an enjoyable narrative voice to make up for that loss. (which is a shame because, alongside forster, one of smith's stated influences is nabokov, that master of the off-kilter first person narrator.)