Book review: Incisive Smith offers insights on creativity in random collection

Zadie Smith: Throughout the collection, Smith holds the reader’s attention with her trademark measured finesse, tackling topics ranging from an enthusiastic defence of fiction to a freak fall from a window as a teenager. Picture: Brian Dowling/Getty Images

• Dead and Alive 
• Zadie Smith 
• Hamish Hamilton £16.99
•  Review: Laura Cassidy

Iconic author Zadie Smith’s fourth essay collection, Dead and Alive, is a slightly random selection of non-fiction. If her third collection, Intimations, resembled a concept album, this offering is more like an extended record with bonus material — everything from forewords to speeches to tributes included.

In the introduction, a reference to Smith’s 2018 essays, Feel Free, foreshadows the reality that aficionados may well have encountered much of this before. Of the book’s 32 pieces, 12 are previously unpublished, and some of these are on the short side.

The opening pages are fresh, however, and Smith reveals why she was first drawn to writing about art: “It didn’t take long to figure out that looking at art requires neither both your hands nor silence. That it can be done swiftly, between playground and naptime, and that you can be very tired, looking at art. Sometimes a fugue state even helps!”

Art writing is something she does particularly well, including spotlighting the work of Nigerian-American visual artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, who drew a portrait of Smith for the National Portrait Gallery. 

Dead and Alive, by Zadie Smith

Describing one of Odutola’s large-scale drawings, 'The Ruling Class (Eshu)', Smith tells us: “A woman stands in an otherworldly landscape, looking out. The landscape is sublime, though not the European sublime of cliffs, peaks and mist. Here the sublime is African… She seems assured both of her mastery over this land and her natural right to it. This sovereignty is expressed primarily by her body — the fabrics she wears, the pose she strikes, all of which find their reflection in the land around her.”

The opening section, one of five, includes pieces of criticism recent enough to feel dated but not dated enough to feel classic, and only tangentially linked. Smith gets away with this, of course, because practically everything she writes is outstanding.

She offers profound insight with elegant ease, whether it be within a craft talk or a book review. Writing about the British painter Celia Paul’s memoir, she observes: “Girlhood seems to be one of the few periods of a woman’s life where her creativity can exist wholly without shame: unbound, feverish, selfish.”

Throughout the collection, Smith holds the reader’s attention with her trademark measured finesse, tackling topics ranging from an enthusiastic defence of fiction to a freak fall from a window as a teenager.

Smith’s prose is always a consoling, illuminating experience. The welcome new material is, predictably, captivating. A standout is 'Some Notes on Mediated Time', where a luddite Smith reveals: “The only way I can access WhatsApp is on my laptop which is like trying to play Mario Kart on a loom.” 

She examines the TV that consumed her youth — “the storification of every element of life from the most personal to the world historical” — and contrasts it with the internet age: “That breathless feeling of being trapped in shallow waters, in something that pretends to be the wide world but is in fact a big box wallpapered with cloud, a place monitored and surveilled, in which time and place begin to lose all meaning.”

A notable piece from those previously published is a review of Stormzy’s 2019 Glastonbury set, originally appearing in the New Yorker. Here, off-duty critic lets loose as fangirl, playfully summarising the performance in the style of a bard recounting a triumphant battle. The rapper is presented as: “Kingly in every fibre, a ‘big man’, charismatic in body and word” and of his destiny Smith remarks: “You have to earn what has already been given.”

Randomness aside, through  Dead and Alive Smith retains her crown as one of the sharpest, sanest, perceptively unpretentious minds of our generation.