Review by New York Times Review
Zadie Smith looks at books, movies and her own history. "TO write critically in English," Zadie Smith asserts in the opening essay of "Changing My Mind," "is to aspire to neutrality, to the high style of, say, Lionel Trilling or Edmund Wilson." Praising Zora Neale Hurston, Smith complains that the mandarin critical mode elevates the experiences of white people to the norm while making "black women talking about a black book" look sectarian. Smith's own way of escaping this narrow assumption is to declare boldly, "Fact is, I am a black woman." A writer like Hurston, Smith adds, makes "'black woman-ness' appear a real, tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share, however improbably, with millions of complex individuals." Hurston also allows Smith "to say things I wouldn't normally"- things like "She is my sister and I love her." After this sonorous declaration, you might expect Smith to reclaim writers and books on behalf of millions of complex individuals whose experiences are misrepresented, insufficiently written about or simply ignored. But she means for us to take the title of her book seriously. "Ideological inconsistency," she writes in her foreword, "is, for me, practically an article of faith." The essays that follow discuss some prominent dead white writers (George Eliot, Kafka, E. M. Forster, Nabokov, Barthes, David Foster Wallace), but they display no Edward Said-style counterreading of canonical texts. Their quirky pleasures derive from Smith's own critical persona - always bold, jauntily self-reflexive and amusing - and her inspired cultural references, which include both Simone Weil and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." There is little hint of Smith's culturally diverse background in her essays on (mostly Hollywood) movies and stars; they belong recognizably to an Anglo-American tradition of writing about cinema that alternates between masochistic reverence and slash-and-burn japery. And Smith resembles a French avant-gardist of the 1950s and '60s rather than a postcolonial writer in her most ambitious essay, "Two Directions for the Novel," which attacks the metaphysical pretensions of the "lyrical-realist" tradition that evidently dominates "Anglophone" fiction. In this essay (which compares Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland" with Tom McCarthy's "Remainder"), Smith passes over the many novels from outside the West that have helped expand traditional bourgeois notions of self and identity. Yet her essay on Barack Obama is replete with the postcolonial-cum-postmodernist themes - hybridity, mimicry and ambivalence - that professors of literature and cultural studies commonly employ in American and British universities. Smith's hope that Obama's "flexibility of voice" may lead to "flexibility in all things" derives not so much from hardheaded political analysis as from academic high theory, which assumes that those who live between cultures best represent and articulate the human condition today. According to Smith, the moral of Obama's story is that "each man must be true to his selves, plural." On this point, at least, Smith is ideologically consistent. In fact, the idea that "the unified singular self is an illusion" could be the leitmotif of this collection. It allows Smith to revisit her own early assumptions and to question such essentialist notions as "black woman-ness." Reflecting on Kafka's ambivalence about his ethnic background, she writes: "There is a sense in which Kafka's Jewish question ('What have I in common with Jews?') has become everybody's question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We're all insects, all Ungeziefer, now." This may sound a bit melodramatic. But then - as Salman Rushdie and other practitioners of postcolonial postmodernism have stressed - ambivalence, doubt and confusion are essential to forming dynamic new hybrid selves. Smith seems to bring to this now entrenched critical ortoxy the particular Weltschmerz of today's bright, successful but sad young writers. This is most evident in the collection's final essay, a long and passionately argued panegyric to David Foster Wallace in which Smith diagnoses the central dilemmas of her own increasingly lost generation. These are dilemmas, she argues, that Henry James, who assumed awareness leads to responsibility, never encountered: "the ubiquity of television, the voraciousness of late capitalism, the triumph of therapeutic discourse and philosophy's demotion into a branch of linguistics." Smith writes with a beguiling mix of assurance and solemnity, borrowing her vocabulary from many intellectual and cultural sources. But a few of her readers may still pause to wonder if the growing irrelevance of academic philosophy is as strong an influence - even on people at university campuses - as the ravages of "late capitalism." For someone so apparently world-weary, Smith can often appear profoundly unworldly. Writing about a trip to Liberia organized by Oxfam, she wavers distractingly from the arch ("There are such things as third-world products") to tourist-brochure blandness ("Bong country is beautiful. Lush green forest, a sweet breeze") to stock atrocity journalism ("A narrow corridor of filth, lined on either side with small dwellings made of trash, mud, scrap metal. Children with distended bellies, rotting food, men breaking rocks"). Compiling an assortment of details, Smith declines to fit them into a pattern. Her essay called "Ten Notes on Oscar Weekend" has the shapelessness implied by its title. Smith visibly moves with greater ease through the decipherable world of texts, but here she often gets bogged down in over-interpretation. The work of David Foster Wallace, an estimable writer of undoubtedly great unfulfilled promise, can't bear the weight of meaning Smith bestows on it, deploying references that range from Zen koans to Noam Chomsky. Lines like "How to be in the world when the world has collapsed into language?" bear too much resemblance to the effusions of an aspirant for a Ph-D. in philosophy. When writing out of her own memory and experience, Smith can quickly cast a spell: her essay on British comedy, which movingly commemorates her father, is among her best. But her preferred stance as a literary and philosophical insurgent, with its related weakness for rousing manifestos, often yields a disconcerting intellectual and moral imprecision. Far from being a complacent purveyor of a triumphant "white" culture, Edmund Wilson wrote feelingly about the Iroquois and Zuni Indians and other endangered minority cultures. We may all be insects now, but a Muslim insect in England doesn't lurk in the same hole as a nonMuslim one. SMITH'S broad-brush pronouncements underscore the limitations of the academic theories she often rehearses. Having hybrid identities, not belonging anywhere or indeed belonging everywhere, may have its advantages, but these attributes must still contend with pressing circumstances like the voraciousness of 21st-century capitalism. Far from floating free in a state of unbelonging, most people are trapped in predetermined social and political positions; they must act within the history that surrounds them. The possession of multiple selves and voices doesn't seem to be helping - and may even be inhibiting - Barack Obama. The victims of the seemingly endless violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan would draw scant comfort from the knowledge that the present occupant of the White House has an ear for different accents and can mimic everyone from a white Harvard nerd to a Kenyan elder. Smith's intellectual ambitions are remarkably consistent with those of the postcolonial writers and academics who have settled into the abstractions of a posh postmodernism. "Changing My Mind" displays many of its virtues: a cosmopolitan suavity and wit that often relieves intellectual ponderousness. Smith's native intelligence, however, seems so formidable that you can't help hoping she'll change her mind yet again.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 27, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
High-profile novelist Smith (On Beauty, 2005) has organized her sharp, funny, and agile essays into sections on reading, being, seeing, feeling, and remembering to create a strong and piquant collection. As the title implies, Smith's thinking evolves before our eyes as she articulates her responses to art and life. Her forthright essay on Zora Neale Hurston is brimming with confessions stemming from her struggle against politically oriented interpretation. Her shrewd take on E. M. Forster revolves around her keen analysis of his admixture of banality and brilliance. Her excellent explication of Middlemarch offers a fresh look at George Eliot, and the crafting of novels. A calm and collected yet searing chronicle of a trip to war-battered Liberia is a standout, as is Speaking in Tongues, in which Smith reflects on her own biracial heritage, identity, and voice as a path to understanding Barack Obama, a politician with the qualities of an artist. Cinematic dispatches, including praise for Katharine Hepburn, are followed by moving memories of her late father. Smith is a superb essayist of skill, candor, and caring.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Smith (White Teeth; On Beauty) had a successful debut as a writer shortly after completing college; reading her essays, one understands why. Her examinations of a wide range of subjects confirm her writing talents with wit, candor, occasional self-deprecation, and insight. In this collection, Smith demonstrates her knack for recognizing and appreciating different points of view. Organized into five sections-"Reading," "Being," "Seeing," "Feeling," and "Remembering"-these essays, most of which were previously published, address an eclectic range of topics, including Italian cinema, visiting Liberia, Hollywood on Oscar night, writing advice, Katharine Hepburn, and President Obama, that will appeal to everyone. The collection features lectures on writing, movie reviews, and literary criticism such as examinations of Franz Kafka, Roland Barthes, Vladimir Nabokov, E.M. Forster, and George Eliot's Middlemarch; Smith pays homage to the late David Foster Wallace and his writing genius. Her essays on her family, especially about her father and his wartime experiences, are candid and touching. Verdict Recommended for readers of nonfiction, creative writing enthusiasts, and literary scholars. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/09.]-Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll., Media, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Rarely does a book that seems to promise so little deliver so much. Even the subtitle, Occasional Essays, of Zadie Smith's nonfiction collection Changing My Mind, carries a whiff of modest ambitions. This isn't, it seems to say, nearly as substantial as Smith's novels. Yet rather than the usual clean-out-the-closets collectionthe miscellany of articles that fills the publication gap between big booksthis volume, which includes previously published material, offers the sort of insight that will not only enlighten fans but should provide plenty of illumination for anyone who appreciates fiction and words and the interplay between writer and reader as much as Smith plainly does. The best of these essays are as concerned with the essence of reading well as writing well. And they are written so incisively, and with so much empathy and warm-hearted humor, that they show how reading has made Smith the writer that she is. Rather than a critic advancing an argument or an academic analyzing in code, she's a writer who understands the reader's perspective, a reader who understands the writer's. When she praises the "broad sympathetic sensibility" of E.M. Forster (who provided the template for her novel On Beauty), she could well be describing her own. Much of her writing on literature doesn't directly critique other writers, but critiques the critiques, as Smith sees Middlemarch through Henry James's eyes while inviting the reader to read (or re-read) George Eliot's classic through Smith's. Whether she's describing how she initially resisted the seminal influence of Zora Neale Hurston, perhaps the first of the great authors about whom Smith has changed her mind, or celebrating the late David Foster Wallace ("he was my favorite living writer") through a close reading of his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, Smith shows a universalist's, omnivorous appetite for literature. The book's title implies more than arriving at a different verdict. As the author matures, becomes more educated and experienced, she reads with a mind that is different than it was. As reading fiction leads to writing it, she develops a more profound understanding of those different, symbiotic roles. "Reading has always been my passion, my pleasure, and I am constitutionally drawn to any thesis that gives power to readers," she writes. "But when I became a writer, writing became my discipline, my practice, and I felt the need to believe in it as an intentional, directional act, an expression of individual consciousness." These essays aren't all about literature. The most moving one is pure memoir, linking the death of her father and her family's appreciation for comedy. (The weakest are the film reviews, some little more than capsules.) But even when delving into politics, Smith brings a novelist's attention to language, style and tone. If she'd never written a novel, this collection alone would make me eager to read more of her work. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
