Greg's Reviews > Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

I'm going pop off this quick little salvo and then move on to other things. Zadie Smith never calls the novel dead in this book. She also never tries to bury the lyrically realistic novel, one gets the feeling that she enjoys the more experimental side of literature but she seems more to want both sides to be able to live, breathe and grow together. She never calls the novelistic form she works in antiquated. I don't think there was a poor reading done of her, I think there was a willful misreading done to incite people to anger. The actual content of her essay was much more banal.

That said, here is how this review would start: Zadie Smith is not David Foster Wallace. Similarly George Saunders is not David Foster Wallace. As the years go on it might become true that Smith and Saunders will become the closest thing the members of the DFW cult have to a living writer who will still come close to capturing his spirit, but they are each their own awkward and self-concious/reflexive selves. I say that because DFW lingers around the margins of the pages of both writers, but it is unfair to compare either of them to him. He is he and she is she.

One essay in particular shows their difference. Zadie Smith covers the Oscars and writes a distant and depersonalized version of her surreal journey into LA for Oscar Weekend. She sterilizes the trip to demystify the cult of celebrity. She is there in an awkwardness worthy of DFW but she is almost like an objective camera taking snapshots of what is happening around her. She is uncomfortable and lets the reader know she is out of place, but paints a picture of what is going on around her in big expressionistic strokes. Not only do the celebrity identities get lost in the focus she takes, but also any of the beauty or magic one associates with Tinseltown. It's a weirdly effective essay for the form or style, but it's a giant disappointment if the reader is hoping to learn anything about the Oscars.

Many reviews for this book point out how smart Zadie Smith is. I'll do it too. She is smart. She's smarter than I am. I'm envious of how erudite she is. I picture her as the really smart girl in class who has a remarkable ease about her. Maybe because she's about my age I think about her in relation to other people I know, and she is smarter than them. I don't think of her like DFW though, he never would have been in my classes, he would have been at a totally other level than anything I was ever at. But, Zadie Smith is also the product of British schooling, which I think also makes her seem smarter. She seems to have a wealth of information and cultural references that she readily chooses from. I imagine if she were American she wouldn't be referencing novelists and golden age movies as much as pop-culture ephemera. TV shows. Advertisements. One-hit wonder bands. Kind of like a Klosterman, or a DFW (again, I have to stop this) without the OED memorized. (But she mentions her own OED in one essay, I don't know what I mean by that, but it's worth mentioning).

Zadie Smith is most entertaining when she leaves literature behind and talks about movies. Her wit comes out then. Talking about literature she seems somewhat restrained; as if she doesn't necessarily want to offend anyone too seriously, or say anything that can be used against her own writing, not that there isn't anything of value in her literature essays, but they are more cerebral and less 'entertaining' than when you get her take on contemporary movies and the stars who drive them. I already returned my copy of the book to the library or I would quote some of her lines here. They are lacerating in their accuracy. In a total goodreads.com world reference, she is Kowalski-esque, in the best sense of the term.