Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Coming November 15th 2016!

Spanning over twenty years and two continents, Zadie Smith’s new novel Swing Time is a charming account of one woman’s coming-of-age during those bygone heydays when video was still killing the radio star.  Smith’s unnamed narrator, a mixed-race child of a striving Jamaican mother and a peaceable, hard-working white father, lives in one of London’s many low-end housing units.  She meets Tracey, her first and only best friend, during dance class at their community center.  The two are bonded over the shared experience of being poor and “brown” in a class that is predominantly white, but an increasing gap in talent and two very different home lives begin to draw the girls apart before puberty even finishes its ravages. As the two stumble towards womanhood, the differences become more stark and divisive, and their friendship is ultimately fractured by what the storyteller perceives as Tracey’s final, unforgiveable act. The past and present simultaneously unfold through the narrator’s musings on her childhood, college days, and finally, her career as an assistant to the long-time pop idol Aimee.  Demanding and charismatic, Aimee requires total submission.  The protagonist’s success in this role is telling, and of a piece with her tendency to allow dominant women to manipulate her life: her mother, Tracey, and Aimee.  She seems content in her subservience until she begins to question the true cost of “privilege” during her time overseeing Aimee’s project, a school for girls, in Africa. This book will appeal to lovers of character-driven fiction because, despite the author’s hints at past hurts and scandal (doled out with a sweet slowness), it’s not the suspense that keeps you coming back. Swing Time is much like a favorite friend whose visits you anticipate, not because of their exploits, but because you simply enjoy their company.

-Jennifer Wilson