This is by Zadie Smith, who also wrote The Fraud.

It was published in 2016; it's her fifth novel; and I found it mesmerizing.



I was alerted to Swing Time by commentary on My Brilliant Friend (and the rest of Elena Ferrante's tetralogy). Smith's is, after all, another book about female friendship, with all its murky, sweet-sour, often destructive, on-again-off-again qualities.

But that's only one facet of it. Our narrator (never named, and never entirely sure of herself) is always in the shadow of three much stronger women.

The first is that "friend". She's Tracey. She and the narrator are both biracial children (one white parent, one black parent); both are from estates located in a fractious part of London; and both attend schools that are far from optimal. Tracey is a talented dancer. She goes to stage school, and lands a few significant parts, but never really makes it. She ends up back in her original neighbourhood, back in poverty, a single mother with three children, an enormous chip on her shoulder, and a spray-gun of vitriol always to hand. Yet, all through the book, she haunts the narrator.

The second giant woman is the narrator's mother (again never named). She looks like Nefertiti, we're told; she's a feminist, and an obsessive auto-didact, determined to make sure nothing drags her or her daughter back to the kind of life she knew in Jamaica. So she's ultra-ambitious, managing to get herself through university, and going on to become a local councillor, and then an MP. This is all thoroughly laudable. But it doesn't necessarily make her a comfortable person to have as a mother. The narrator comments: "My earliest sense of her was of a woman plotting an escape, from me, from the very role of motherhood." Later, the daughter constantly feels inferior: "I felt, as usual, my own smallness next to her, the scale of what she had achieved, the frivolousness of my own occupation in comparison, despite all she'd tried to direct me towards."

The third woman who towers over the narrator's life is Aimee, a pop sensation who rocketed out of Bendigo, Australia, during the 1980s, and whose continued stardom sees her jetting around the world doing concerts and all kinds of other spin-off activities. She's for ever young, for ever energetic, for ever acting out her credo: "In this life... you've got to know what you want. You have to visualize it, and then you have to pull it down... Want it, see it, take it. No apologies." The narrator becomes her assistant, thereby acquiring another larger-than-life person to compare herself to.


Bendigo, 2008

Dominated by these women, sometimes simultaneously, the narrator has somehow terminally erased herself.

The book opens at a point in 2008, when she has been fired from her job with Aimee. She finds some consolation in rewatching a scene from Swing Time, where Fred Astaire dances with three shadow figures: "A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow." The rest of the novel illustrates what this means, and we zigzag back and forth between life with Aimee (which begins when the narrator is 22), and her longstanding relationships with Tracey and with Mum (my shorthand for "the narrator's mother" -- she's never described like this in the book).

As a child, the narrator wanted to dance (this is how she meets Tracey), but she doesn't really have the ability; she sings pretty well, but only rarely allows herself to indulge this passion. She has always loved watching old musicals, and one of the things she admires about Fred Astaire is his capacity to think of himself in the third person when he's critiquing his own performance on screen: "I took this to heart, or rather, it echoed a feeling I already had, mainly that it was important to treat oneself as a kind of stranger, to remain unattached and unprejudiced in your own case... Yes, I thought that was a very elegant attitude."

So, that's the hole that these other women fill. When Tracey goes off to stage school, the narrator feels bereft: "At a loss, I became a Goth -- it was where people who had nowhere else to go ended up." She often feels jealous that Tracey has not only achieved some prominence but also has an adoring mother, white and ordinary, who backs her come what may. Not that the narrator is unaware of her friend's multiple problems -- her (more sensible) mother has always thought that "something serious" happened to Tracey at some point, and she acts up, quite dangerously, on a regular basis. Nevertheless, she's big and bold, and in-your-face, while the narrator languishes in the shadows.

Meanwhile, Mum encourages her daughter to take the entrance exams for a better school (but our anti-heroine rebels, and fails to get in); her mother is later somewhat disdainful of the university she attends ("a trumped-up hotel"). Unsurprisingly, there's an estrangement between the two women. When Mum is close to death (she dies of cancer, aged 57), the narrator wishes Aimee could have been there, because she is good at deathbeds: "On each occasion [I] had been impressed and humbled by her way of being with the dying, her honesty, warmth and simplicity, which nobody else in the room ever seemed able to manage, not even family."

Her mother, meanwhile, has been all too aware of the way Aimee has subsumed the narrator's life: "SHE has a life... We read about it in the papers. You SERVICE her life. She's a giant sucking thing, sucking your youth..." Yet in some ways, Aimee, 12 years older than the narrator, is there for her emotionally in ways her mother isn't...

This succession of ironies is one the reasons I liked this book so much. Nothing is simple here. Everyone, whether black or white, is presented in shades of grey.



Tracey is definitely the most complex, and therefore most interesting, character. From childhood, egged on by her mother, she has been bold and defiant. But there's something fundamentally misanthropic about her. She wrecks things. By means of a story that might not even be true, she destroys the narrator's formerly good relationship with her father; her nasty allegations torpedo poor Mr Booth, the pianist for the girls' dance class; she viciously harasses the narrator's mother online; and just when the narrator is regaining the upper hand with regard to her breakup with Aimee, Tracey circulates an ancient video of an inappropriate childhood dance routine, with the message: "Now everyone knows who you really are."

All these actions -- plus the fact that she is deep into conspiracy theories, and she's back absolutely where she started, her dance career having come to nothing -- point to utter powerlessness. And yet even when she is persecuting Mum, she exercises an extraordinary influence over the narrator, who somehow feels as though she has failed in discharging a responsibility: "The power she has over me is the same as it has always been, judgement, and it goes beyond words. There is no case I can make that will change the fact that I was her only witness, the only person who knows all that she has in her, all that's been ignored and wasted, and yet I still left her back there, in the ranks of the unwitnessed, where you have to scream to get heard... Whatever she was doing, I knew it was a form of judgement upon me. I was her sister: I had a sacred duty towards her. Even if only she and I knew it and recognized it, it was still true."

And Tracey's family life, with her three disparate children, also somehow becomes enviable. Tracey is the last topic the narrator discusses with her dying mother. Mum says the time has come to "do something" about Tracey's family; bizarrely, she says the best place for Tracey's children is with her daughter. So the narrator -- who has always rejected the idea of having children -- walks to Tracey's flat, with this fantasy of a ready-made family briefly in her head. Her mother actually dies while she is on her way to Tracey's... She arrives, by now a little more realistic, but feeling that perhaps there might be something she can offer, "something simpler, more honest, between my mother's idea of salvation and nothing at all". Then she sees Tracey on the balcony, "in a dressing gown and slippers, her hands in the air, turning, turning, her children around her, everybody dancing". This is the end of the book. Surrounded by people... Everybody dancing...

Mum, meanwhile, much as we admire her, pushes everyone away. Her daughter, her husband, her male lover, her female lover. And there's something bogus about her, too, as the narrator comes to realize. A feminist, she has always been supported by men; keen to talk about the "nobility of labour", she never had a real job while the narrator was at home ("she worked 'for the people' -- there was no wage"); she has Marxist tendencies, but is happy when a new partner turns out to have a flat worth "well over a million".

Aimee is in some ways the most stereotypical of the narrator's three guiding lights. She is the archetypally thoughtless pop star, largely oblivious to the struggles of others, fundamentally uninterested in detail, always ready with some big idea, and always sheltered from reality (her staff "waded through the tangled weeds so she might float over the surface"). Aimee appropriates everything. She's like a magpie. Things people say. Cultural artefacts. Other people's photos. Other people's stories. Even the child of other people, African people (it sounds a bit irregular: "A two-page document. A monumental amount of money, in local terms. We spent about the same on household flowers in a year")... And the narrator, though subsumed by her, ends up jealous of her too.

The entanglements become even more complex when Aimee embarks on a philanthropic phase. She has decided she wants to "be the change we want to see". And her target is Africa. When she has had a few drinks, she can't even remember the name of the country ("tiny country... in the west?"), but her goal is to improve girls' education. The narrator says: "It pleased my mother to call Aimee's way of doing things 'naive'. But Aimee felt she had already tried my mother's route, the political route... Now she was committed to 'making change happen on the ground'."

I found the Africa-based segments fascinating. The narrator is mixed-race, and so her impressions of the target village in (we assume) The Gambia are doubly poignant. But there was so much about her learning-curve that I recognized from our own brief time in Cote d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso (1997-98).


Some of the people who helped me understand how little I understood...

The speeches... (an "endless, agitated address" translates into "things are very difficult here"); the ceaselessly working women; the round-about way of referring to something negative or difficult; "those large tartan-checked shopping bags they also sell in Kilburn market, international symbol of the thrifty and far-travelled"; the way outsiders are seen as akin to children, not able to do things, not able to tolerate things, fit only for play (not without reason, of course: "Great care was taken at all times to protect me from reality. They'd met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take").

In some ways, the narrator never acclimatizes: "I looked around me at the poverty Aimee hoped to 'reduce'. It was all I could see." She is also often tone-deaf in her critical reactions to the educational practices she witnesses.

Others in her entourage have a more rounded perspective. Fernando (Fern), who has a background in development work, and has been hired as project manager for Aimee's school endeavour, is a listener. He digests things, brings people together, and facilitates solutions. He's neither dewy-eyed nor overwhelmed.

Granger, Aimee's black American minder, sees the village as a homecoming. The people love him for this: "Where I saw deprivation, injustice, poverty, Granger saw simplicity, a lack of materialism, communal beauty." Granger is the one who points out that every country has problems: "Serious struggles in America," he tells them, "For our people, black people".

Even Aimee, superficial Aimee, takes to the village (although admittedly she knows she won't be spending much time there). She's delighted by the "element of roadside chaos" (it used to delight me too). She isn't fazed by poverty in the way the narrator is.

Of course, Aimee's project gets tangled up with corruption, government pressure, presidential vanity, and local jealousies. (I say "of course", not because I'm making disparaging cultural assumptions, but because I've read of so many such failures, and see no reason why this one would be different. It's no reflection on Africa. Any project that tries to paper over such vast power disparities is bound to come to grief, I would think.) Fern smooths out lots of rough patches, but eventually he stops working for Aimee, "concerned with the 'distorting' effect of her money in the village, the collapse of government services in the area, and the foundation's naive, complicit dealings with the government".



There's lots more I could comment on, because this is such a detailed book, where every little picture criss-crosses with all the other little pictures, and adds something to the main picture. There's plenty that could be said, for example, about the various fathers, and the various lovers.

But I'll limit myself to just a few more points:

1. The most superficial first: It's a brilliant representation of an era. There's Angel Delight; there are Findus crispy pancakes; there's the business of waiting for "interminably slow dial-up"; there's a reminder of how excited we felt about political change in the UK at the end of the 1990s (didn't last long, of course).

2. And more seriously: When the narrator visits some of the sites of slave history, confronting the places to which her mother said all paths ultimately led back, she can see only the generality: "I experienced it not as an exceptional place but as an example of a general rule. Power had preyed on weakness here: all kinds of power -- local, racial, tribal, royal, national, global, economic -- on all kinds of weakness, stopping at nothing, not even at the smallest girl child. But power does that everywhere. The world is saturated in blood. Every tribe has their blood-soaked legacy: here was mine."

3. There's a lot of talk in the village about "the back way", that is, the clandestine route to Europe. There's little room for opposition to the president, but there are definitely dissenting voices: "Nobody here loves him or what he has done here. Everybody who can leaves. Back way, back way, back way, back way." Those who don't want to take that route try to find other ways to escape. We meet Hawa, whose middle-class status makes her a rarity in the village. Her father and two brothers have gone to Europe, but she has been left behind with the grandmas and children. To the narrator's dismay, she decides to marry a member of the Tablighi (itinerant preachers espousing a curious mixture of rationalism, conservativism, contemplation, and superstition). The narrator is shocked that Hawa is embarking on what will be a complete change of lifestyle. It's Fern who reminds her that Hawa might have more freedom as a roving preacher's wife than she has in the village.

4. Then there's that white/black thing that I don't think anyone white will ever really understand. The mixed-race narrator finds that her skin colour provokes all kinds of reactions. She encounters negativity (for example from the Iranian owner of the pizza joint where she briefly works); she suspects that she's viewed by Aimee's contingent as a useful contribution to diversity; and she's bewildered when she's sometimes seen as white -- by her childhood friend Lily, for example; or by the villagers, when she impresses them with her dancing: "Even though you are a white girl, you dance like you are a black!" Yet she also sometimes doesn't understand others' racial sensitivities. Fern is disconcerted when he realizes she regards him as white: "In Brazil we don't understand ourselves as white, you understand. At least my family does not."

5. That last point relates to the title, and the narrator's confusing and confused love of old musicals. And here others can put it much better than I can:

-- Constance Grady explains: "Swing Time is a book about dance, and about female friendships, and about living life as a shadow. It is also a book about race and privilege. And all of those elements are present in that early description of how it feels to watch Fred Astaire dance -- as well as in the embarrassed, understated shock of the mixed-race narrator as she realizes that Fred Astaire’s shadow dance is a minstrel show and Astaire is in blackface."

-- Eric Karl Anderson also develops this angle: "[The narrator is] a girl from the 80s watching a film Ali Baba Goes to Town from 1937 which is a Hollywood interpretation of an African tribe acting like dancers from Harlem. It’s a complex, layered look at time with versions of identity being refracted through multiple lenses and it leaves the narrator somewhat lost... Late in the novel the narrator befriends a gay couple who seem to embody something she herself can’t quite obtain. She makes the observation that they are 'Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either.' The narrator seems in some way to have been deformed by these images from the past and the novel’s story is her journey to arrive at a more cohesive sense of self."


Fred Astaire in Swing Time

-- Laurel Miller concludes: "There’s always a gap, in Swing Time, between the plan and the execution, between the way we think or believe things ought to be and the way they turn out... Our ideals and our imperatives are forever failing to account for the complexity and unpredictability of the people and experiences we impose them on. Smith isn’t repudiating those ideals, any more than she’s using her narrator to condone Astaire’s blackface. At that same time, the sublimity of that dance number can’t be denied. To live in the syncopation between what ought to be and what is, in swing time, is to know that the latter, for all its unruliness, is always more human and often more interesting. Every once in a while, it can even be more beautiful."

-- It's Annalisa Quinn who perhaps sums this up best: "Swing Time breaks the idea that we can ever come to a concrete identity, or reach the safe plains of self-knowledge. Identity is rather an exchange between people, a shifting topography, where the ground can collapse at any moment... With Swing Time, Zadie Smith identifies the impossible contradiction all adults are asked to maintain -- be true to yourself, and still contain multitudes; be proud of your heritage, but don't be defined by it. She frays the cords that keep us tied to our ideas of who we are, to our careful self-mythologies. Some writers name, organize, and contain; Smith lets contradictions bloom, in all their frightening, uneasy splendor."

Bottom line: Read this book.


London, the 1990s