Zadie Smith is bad, now
or, the Self-Cancellation of Z. Smith by the Coward Z. Smith
Zadie Smith is bad now. She wrote a very bad essay in The New Yorker that is bad. You see, the essay takes a complex situation that, despite its actual complexity, pretty clearly possesses a good side and a bad side, and instead renders it into a neoliberal muddle. It is an essay redolent of the stark refusal to plainly state the obvious that the finest pieces of popular criticism in the Clinton and W. eras (and therefore, the Tony Blair era, in her home country) could only hope to achieve, and this makes her bad, apparently.
Some of us think she was bad before. Some of us are rushing to confirm that once she was Good, Actually, but now she is Bad, Actually, and you need to know that we’ve changed our opinion on that because our commitment to bien pensant politics is only rivaled by our incessant toadyism.
In short, Zadie Smith, late of Cambridge University, did a both sidesism. And some of us feel implicated by that fact. Because, you see, we can’t have any both sidesisms. Except for my both sidesism. Because it is good, and correct, and brave, and independent, and right-minded.
To be clear: Zadie Smith is wrong. She mischaracterizes the ongoing genocide in Gaza; she misunderstands the nature, objective, and purpose of the student protests; and she fails to do what a critic of culture and literature is supposed to do (which I am old-fashioned enough to think involves at least asking interesting questions). She reaches for shallow appeals to philosophy and ethics that are not grounded in engagement with the signal thinkers in those fields, and—more importantly—her argument fails to grasp even recent history, let alone the deeper century-plus of Zionist ideology and Palestinian displacement that lead to the particular horrifying crossroads we find ourselves at. And no, Zadie Smith, words are not violence. US-made and -brokered bombs turning Gazan homes and hospitals and bakeries and universities into rubble is violence.
All the same, many of those patting themselves on the back for never having liked her novels are being disengenuous. Her project has been fairly consistent: to use the literary heritage of Great Britain and the Commonwealth—Rushdie, Woolf, Forster, in particular—to reimagine the novel in the 20th century. It’s pretty ambitious, and sometimes it’s pretty good. Occasionally she will break with the form (The Autograph Man, Swing Time), and while the results are more original, they are also less successful.
No, most of us praised her novels, and most of us had good reason for doing so. They’re usually interesting and often arresting. (There’s also something to be said about the culture industry’s need to push certain writers of color to be spokespeople, which is a related but different essay.) But in her attempt to recover the aesthetic sweep of British and Commonwealth literature (and I use the anachronism “Commonwealth” because it so accurately captures the political unconscious from which her work springs), she also tends to glide over or refuse the exploration (in a contemporary register) of the political matrix that the high modernist (or Victorian, in the case of her most recent novel, The Fraud) writers she evokes wrote within (or against, as the case may be).
By basing her project on the aesthetic emulation of modernist and postmodernist novelists without engaging the spiky political contexts these writers navigated, she winds up with an technically impressive body of work that amounts to little more than a wash of neoliberal global culture mediated through the novel form. The underlying politics of that project were au courant at the turn of the millennium, and remained relevant for quite some time after, but she remains stuck there, unaware that the milk has curdled.
In Zadie Smith’s novelistic world, there are no visions of Clarissa Dalloway plumbing the depths of female interiority while married to a Tory MP and enjoying the comforts and privileges thereof; there are no figures like Aziz and Fielding astride their horses almost but not quite embracing in friendship, the gulf of the Raj separating and thwarting whatever their individual desires might be; there are no precocious youths endowed with quasi-magical powers navigating the reality of a suddenly independent India. In Zadie Smith’s novelistic world, there are just a bunch of people doing a bunch of things while having a bunch of identities that don’t seem to mean anything more than what dialect and setting meant to the local color writers of the late 19th and early 20th century US. It can make for a cracking good yarn, but it isn’t going to intrigue and beguile us as the gears of history grind on. The mill, as it were, is out of grist.
All that remains are the pages of The New Yorker. Enjoy your sandwich!