Book Review: Swing Time is a transitional novel for Zadie Smith, but also deceptively simple. Dedicated to her mother, here Smith ventures into first person narration for (I think) the first time in a novel. This is not an optimistic book. None of the characters grow in the novel as they only fulfill their destinies, as the twig is bent. None succeed and in the end there is no resolution and little hope. No one escapes their fate. There are three time-lines here, one beginning in childhood, one as young adults, and the third, a framing device, after the book's climactic event. Two young, brown girls who want to dance become friends and frenemies. Our unnamed narrator (OUN) has an ambitious, immigrant black mother who works hard at her own education, but is distant and removed, and a loving, white, English father who supports the family but is otherwise passive and ineffectual. The other girl, Tracey has an absent, black father, ambitious but criminal, and a white, English mother who is a bit of a mess but dotes on her daughter. Tracey becomes a dancer in the West End until she hits a ceiling in her career. OUN becomes a personal assistant to an older, international pop star (picture a younger Madonna) who decides to build a girls' school in West Africa, another invading white savior. There OUN meets and slowly (she may be too African for England, but she's too English for Africa) makes friends with Africans who have a poor but idealized (they can connect) life, however, their lives too are changing as the effects of colonization continue.
Much of Swing Time seemed like a simple description of the lives of two girls (sometimes friends) growing up, with no apparent reason for telling the story. The meaning, however, is not in the events, but the interplay between the characters, their trajectories, how their backgrounds create their futures, how love is not found, lives are not lived. Smith, using OUN, is endlessly perceptive, defying stereotypes, seeing through pretense and political correctness, creating rounded, contradictory characters who fail to connect. She creates seemingly meaningless, throw away scenes (especially in the two girls' childhood) that only resonate much later, providing insights that complete the jigsaw puzzle of these lives. Characters love and are not loved in return, become shadows in the lives of others, live on the periphery, fail to find joy or even contentment. Few people work. As the seeds are sown so they've grown. At times the reader just wants to shake them and say, use your skills! Use what you've been given, do what you can! Swing Time's most driven character, OUN's mother, can't pass on that ambition, even as she can't parent and has little time for love. They can't escape their "tribes" (Smith's word). Although the characters are all flawed and frustrating, I had to keep reading, I still wanted to know what became of them, and I still wonder even now after finishing the book. My only negative here is that at times Zadie Smith seemed to lose interest, her writing becoming quite average, as if she'd lost her way for a page. Part of it may reflect the lack of direction, or the frustrated direction, of the characters. But I wonder if Smith herself became a little frustrated with the story, as she tried to find her way in what I think is a new direction for her. But no mistake, this is a book worth reading, society on the page, with endless parallels between characters that will become people you know, and leave you thinking. [4★]
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