It\u2019s an honor to introduce Zadie Smith.\u00a0 I shouldn\u2019t be nervous, because introductions are easy, right?\u00a0 Zadie Smith, meet Swarthmore College and Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. \u00a0Swarthmore, Zadie Smith. \u00a0Yet introductions are really impossible, because more words need to be said but it\u2019s hard to be brief\u2014and don\u2019t worry, I will be brief\u2014about a writer whose intelligence in these insane times we desperately need.<\/p>\n
Zadie Smith has published lots of fiction and nonfiction and won lots of honors, but I don\u2019t want to list these, for you can easily find out about these on your own.\u00a0 We all secretly know that prizes for books may be good for many things but they don\u2019t ensure that new generations of readers will keep an author alive.\u00a0 Only immutable but light-filled writing<\/em> will do that.\u00a0 So let me mention just a few of my favorite passages and sentences of hers, ones I believe will last because, as Ezra Pound said, only emotion that has found its form endures.<\/p>\n Consider some of the treasures to be found in her essay collection Changing My Mind<\/em>.\u00a0 There are meditations on Zora Neale Hurston, E. M. Forster, George Eliot, Barthes and Nabokov, Kafka, and David Foster Wallace that will make you want immediately to read these authors if you haven\u2019t, and if you have will make you want to go back to your book shelves and pull them down again.\u00a0 There\u2019s surreal and harrowing journalism on what she saw and heard during a trip to Liberia, and delightful pieces on Hepburn and Garbo and what it\u2019s like to be in Hollywood during Oscar Weekend.\u00a0 (About the latter, she hilariously imitates both a star-struck celebrity puff piece and an intellectual\u2019s disdain for everything that is fun but \u201cvulgar.\u201d \u00a0But don\u2019t be fooled; Smith is ultimately up to something very different.)\u00a0 Changing My Mind<\/em> also has her thoughts on Obama\u2019s Dreams of my Father<\/em>, which include these sentences:\u00a0 \u201cThe tale he tells is not the old tragedy of gaining a new, false voice at the expense of a true one.\u00a0 The tale he tells is all about addition.\u00a0 His is the story of a genuinely many-voiced man\u201d (136).\u00a0 And her analysis of contemporary fiction, which discusses its metafictional vs. realist divide and then slyly hints that really good fiction not just changes our minds but finds ways to synthesize these two traditions while making neither insular nor predictable.<\/p>\n But tonight I\u2019d like to spend a little more time introducing you to two essays, \u201cSmith Family Christmas,\u201d written for the New York Times<\/em> in 2003, and her moving tribute to the novelist David Foster Wallace, who died in 2008.\u00a0 The commissioned Christmas piece contains no schmaltz.\u00a0 It\u2019s a sad and funny look back, at parents and siblings and the craziness of family, which in some ways mirrors the craziness of the nation you happen to be born into.\u00a0 \u201cOn this most sacred of days,\u201d she remembers, her uncle Denzil wanted to do \u201cthe things we do not do because we\u2019d always done them another way, our way\u2014a way we\u2019d all hated, to be sure, but could not change.\u00a0 Denzil wants to open a present on Christmas Eve\u2014don\u2019t do that, Denzil\u201d (227).\u00a0 Note how she\u2019s both voicing the family rules here and viewing them from outside and beyond, a rueful retrospective on how small holiday tensions hide greater ones.\u00a0 The same supple voice, full of deadpan wryness, works on her birth country as well:\u00a0 \u201cthe Smiths lived in London in a half-English, half-Irish council estate called Athelstan Gardens, one black family squished between two tribes at war.\u00a0 It was confusing.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t understand why certain football games made people pour into Biddy Mulligan\u2019s pub and hit other people over the head with chairs and bottles\u201d (226).\u00a0 Yet in the end her little essay about our wars disguised as celebrations is full of forgiveness.\u00a0 Now that she has her own family, regarding holiday festivities she says let\u2019s try it again, let\u2019s believe we can do it better, \u201cthe ritual, the dream, the animating spirit, the whole shebang\u201d (229).<\/p>\n Swarthmore\u2019s Jonathan Franzen published in The New Yorker<\/em> his own tribute to David Foster Wallace, one in which he recounts how he was tempted to put his own life in danger in a kind of bizarre tribute to Wallace\u2019s own edgy battle between his death wish and his will to live and write.\u00a0 Yet Franzen also suggested that for all his friend\u2019s pyrotechnical writerly gifts there was one subject he couldn\u2019t explore deeply:\u00a0 human interconnectedness, especially love.\u00a0 Zadie Smith takes a very different tack.\u00a0 Writing about Brief Interviews with Hideous Men<\/em>, Wallace\u2019s uncanny gathering of experiments in short fiction, Smith says that \u201cthe real mystery and magic lies in [its] quasi-mystical moments, portraits of extreme focus and total relinquishment.\u00a0 We might feel more comfortable calling this \u201cmeditation,\u201d but I believe the right word is in fact prayer<\/em>.\u00a0 It\u2019s true that this is prayer unmoored, without its usual object, God, but it is still focused, self-forgetful, moving in an outward direction toward the unfathomable\u2026. \u00a0Wallace understood better than most that for the secular among us, art has become our best last hope for undergoing this experience\u201d (295).\u00a0 Wallace\u2019s stories, she says, \u201crepel the idea that a just society can come from the contract made between self-interested or egotistic individuals.\u201d\u00a0 And then, marking Wallace\u2019s interest in Lewis Hyde\u2019s The Gift<\/em> and what she sees as his spiritual affinity with Simone Weil and Kant, Smith gives us a dazzling Wallacean footnote that begins, \u201cAll three [have] in common that the business of ethics properly concerns good relations between<\/em> people rather than the individual\u2019s relation toward some ultimate goal, or end\u201d (291).<\/p>\n Zadie Smith\u2019s own fictions have quite similar concerns, and they map these locally and globally. \u00a0They appeal to the better angels of our nature even as they make us see ourselves at our most embarrassing worst.\u00a0 In Smith\u2019s latest novel, NW<\/em>, the narrator at one point articulates a character\u2019s worry and frets that \u201cNothing survives its telling\u201d (16).\u00a0 Yet for a novel to get written and live for readers, of course, that must not be completely true\u2014we need to worry about how false language may lie and even kill, but novels we keep reading prove the right words eventually, after some struggle, can<\/em> be found, and, when found, generate pocket-sized miracles of understanding. \u00a0Otherwise, why write, and why read?<\/p>\n We are passing through a time in our nation where many of us are increasingly self-segregating by class, education, income, religion, and politics\u2014how we work and travel, to some extent, but especially where we live and how we spend our leisure time.\u00a0 The factors driving such homogenization are many and complex, but these developments, if they continue, will be as corrosive for democracy as money buying politicians.\u00a0 The trend is happening globally as well.\u00a0 One of the purposes of education should be to combat stratification, but historically that has been the novelist\u2019s role too\u2014and it\u2019s never more needed than now.\u00a0 Don\u2019t believe in the death of the novel.\u00a0 It\u2019s the dearth<\/em> of novel readers that ought to cause worry.\u00a0 Today\u2019s best novelists model for us what it\u2019s like to talk and to listen across our many divides. \u00a0And let me suggest to you they don\u2019t sound like Tom Wolfe, whose characters only know how to scream at each other.\u00a0 In the long history of social fiction, the great story-tellers have always told us tales about contact zones, not comfort zones. \u00a0Zadie Smith\u2019s four novels are most famous for detailing the rhythms and crossings of urban contact zones, but she\u2019s also explored how contact zones can be experienced on the road, or at a college or university.\u00a0 This writer is a powerful search engine, a social network generator who works not by cajoling us to click \u201clike\u201d but to take risks as readers, to change our minds.\u00a0 Please give Zadie Smith a most warm welcome.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s an honor to introduce Zadie Smith.\u00a0 I shouldn\u2019t be nervous, because introductions are easy, right?\u00a0 Zadie Smith, meet Swarthmore College and Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. \u00a0Swarthmore, Zadie Smith. \u00a0Yet introductions are really impossible, because more words need to be said but … Continue reading