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Summary
Summary
A New York Times bestseller * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction * Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from North West London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty.
Two brown girls dream of being dancers--but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.
Tracey makes it to the chorus line but struggles with adult life, while her friend leaves the old neighborhood behind, traveling the world as an assistant to a famous singer, Aimee, observing close up how the one percent live.
But when Aimee develops grand philanthropic ambitions, the story moves from London to West Africa, where diaspora tourists travel back in time to find their roots, young men risk their lives to escape into a different future, the women dance just like Tracey--the same twists, the same shakes--and the origins of a profound inequality are not a matter of distant history, but a present dance to the music of time.
Zadie Smith's new book, Grand Union , is on sale 10/8/2019.
Author Notes
Zadie Smith is a novelist, essayist and short story writer. As of 2012, she has published four novels, White Teeth (2000), The Autograph Man (2002), On Beauty (2005), and NW (2012), all of which have received critical praise. In 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors and Smith won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2006. Her novel White Teeth was included in Time magazines TIME 100 Best English-language. Smith joined NYU's Creative Writing Program as a tenured professor in 2010.
Smith attended Hampstead Comprehensive School, and King's College, Cambridge University where she studied English literature.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
At a dance class offered in a local church in London in the early 1980s, two brown girls recognize themselves in one another and become friends. Tracey has a sassy white mum, a black father in prison, and a pink Barbie sports car. The other girl, the narrator of Smith's (NW) powerful and complex novel, remains unnamed. Although she lives in the same public housing as Tracey, she's being raised among books and protests by an intellectual black feminist mother and a demure white father. As with Smith's previous work, the nuances of race relations are both subtle and explicit, not the focus of the book and yet informing every interaction. The girls both love dancing, but this commonality reflects their differences more than their similarities. Whereas Tracey's physical grace is confident and intuitive, the narrator is drawn to something more ephemeral: "a dancer was a man from nowhere, without parents or siblings, without a nation or people, without obligations of any kind, and this was exactly the quality I loved," she thinks. The book tracks the girls as they move in different directions through adolescence and the final, abrupt fissures of their affection; it also follows the narrator into adulthood, where she works for a decade as the personal assistant to a world-famous (white) pop star named Aimee. In this role, she's able to embody what she admired about dancers as a child: she travels constantly, rarely sees her mother, and has lost touch with everyone other than her employer. Once Aimee begins to build a girls' school in an unnamed Muslim West African country, the novel alternates between that world and the London of the girls' youth. In both places, poverty is a daily struggle and the juxtaposition makes for poignant parallels and contrasts. Though some of the later chapters seem unnecessarily protracted, the story is rich and absorbing, especially when it highlights Smith's ever-brilliant perspective on pop culture. Agent: Georgia Garrett, Rogers, Coleridge and White. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The unnamed narrator in Smith's agile and discerning bildungsroman is entranced and provoked by a Fred Astaire dance number in the movie Swing Time. Swing time is also a feat her narrator performs as she pivots from the disastrous present back to the past as she tries to understand her plummet by telling her story and that of her childhood best friend, Tracey. Though passionate and knowledgeable about dance, especially pioneering African American tap stars Jeni LeGon and the Nicholas Brothers, the narrator doesn't have the body for it, while Tracey has the requisite build and drive. Both brown girls lived in a London housing project in the early 1980s the narrator with her ambitiously political Jamaican mother and her laid-back white father, Tracey with her white mother, while longing for her black father whose appearances were infrequent and fraught. Close as they are, the girls are destined for diverging paths as Tracey stakes her future on dance, and the narrator muddles through a goth phase and college, then lucks into a job as a personal assistant to an international pop star, the fiercely willful, strikingly pale Aimee, who hijacks her life. Smith's narrator's anxiety and recalcitrance are legion, but through her omnivorous senses, wary skepticism, and ballistic wit we experience vitally detailed settings and dramatic and ludicrous situations that put to the test assumptions about self and community, creativity and activism. The Ginger Rogers to various Fred Astaires from her mother to Tracey to Aimee she recounts her disconcerting misadventures in London, New York, and, most intensely, a small, poor, tyrannized West African country in which Aimee decides to build a girls' school, while incorporating African dance into her act. As the narrator struggles to find her way through a maze of morally dubious desires and demands, Smith postulates equations of power in relationships complicated by race, class, gender, celebrity, culture, politics, and religion.With homage to dance as a unifying force, arresting observations (elegance attracted me . . . . I liked the way it hid pain), exceptionally diverse and magnetizing characters, and lashing satire, Swing Time is an acidly funny, fluently global, and head-spinning novel about the quest for meaning, exaltation, and love. Excitement always surrounds much-lauded Smith's books (NW, 2012), and this tale of friendship lost and found is going to be big.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHITE RAGE: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, by Carol Anderson. (Bloomsbury, $17.) In 2014, as protests erupted in Ferguson, Mo., after the killing of Michael Brown, Anderson wrote about the white backlash to black progress. She expands her argument to include tensions stretching back to the Civil War, times when white rage thwarted efforts toward democracy and a semblance of racial equality. SWING TIME, by Zadie Smith. (Penguin, $17.) Two girls in Northwest London forge a close, complicated friendship in their dance class, where they are the only "brown girls"; they rely on one another to navigate a swirl of issues surrounding class, race and politics. Years later, their relationship has ruptured but still forms the emotional core of the novel, which brims with "cadenced digressions and lyrical love letters" to dance and London itself, Holly Bass wrote here. BEING MORTAL: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande. (Picador, $16.) Gawande, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a surgeon, examines various models of living for older people, from multigenerational homes to hospice care, and outlines a case for a paradigm shift among medical professionals: Doctors should expand their focus from treating and curing disease to improving well-being and end-of-life care. THE SENILITY OF VLADIMIR R, by Michael Honig. (Pegasus, $15.95.) A novel imagines President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in decline: retired, sidelined by dementia and tended to by a cast of aides. His nurse, Nikolai, an unfailingly scrupulous man, is naive about Russia's corruption, until his nephew becomes embroiled in a scandal - exacerbated by Nikolai's proximity to Vladimir. As our reviewer, Boris Fishman, wrote, "this is an author who understands the grotesque reality of a place where the honest man is the coward." LABOR OF LOVE: The Invention of Dating, by Moira Weigel. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $16.) After a heartbreak, Weigel set out to investigate the history of courtship in the United States and the romantic dissatisfaction and unbalanced gender roles it perpetuates. Weigel adroitly draws on pop culture and history - from reality TV to the self-help industry - as evidence, though her scope is largely limited to straight couples. HOW TO PARTY WITH AN INFANT, by Kaui Hart Hemmings. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) With her personal life in turmoil, Mele Bart, a single mother in San Francisco, looks to a local cookbook competition as a distraction. There, she finds solace and strength in a band of other hilarious and misfit parents, who help temper the absurdities of raising children in a hypercompetitive and status-obsessed community.
Guardian Review
Moving between west Africa and London, adulthood and the past, this coming-of-age tale explores themes of celebrity, failure and shame London in the 1980s: two best friends, with two things in common. The first is their love of dance -- one of the girls has talent, the other has flat feet. Both girls are mixed race, but the dynamics of each family are different. The good dancer Tracey's father is African-Caribbean, her mother white English; the unnamed narrator's father is white English and her mother African-Caribbean. These shared backgrounds and desires are what bring the girls together in the school playground and keep them together throughout their growing years. But there are differences, too, between Tracey's slovenly mother, who buys her daughter mountains of toys and a bed in the shape of a pink sports car, and the narrator's autodidact mother, who urges self-improvement on her daughter and disapproves of her relationship with Tracey; and between Tracey's father, who is serving time in prison, and the narrator's own father, who is kind and unambitious. These subtle distinctions of class and race will drive them apart. This is the territory of Zadie Smith at her finest. For many, school friendships are the most enduring relationships of our lives; and the nature of those same-sex bonds, the trust and mistrust, the kindness and betrayals, the camaraderie as well as the competitiveness, lie at the centre of Smith's fifth novel, Swing Time. The story opens with a scandal and a public shaming, the modern version of the stocks and whipping post. We are not told what the narrator, alone and estranged from family and friends and from her former best friend Tracey, has done to deserve her fate. From there the novel unspools, moving rapidly back and forth between the girls' early years and the recent past, to finally reveal the source of the shaming. The narrator abandons her dancing ambitions early in the novel, though she and Tracey continue to spend their afternoons watching Fred Astaire routines and Michael Jackson videos. Tracey is passionate, fickle, self-deluding (she insists her absent father has been not in prison but on tour with Jackson). Promiscuous, capable of loyalty and thoughtlessness, hard-edged, hard-nosed and hard-working, she enjoys the uncritical support of her single mother. In contrast, the narrator is less confident than Tracey and as a result less ambitious: a slightly unsympathetic heroine, detached in her relationship with her mother and with men. It is her voice that sets the tone for this measured and ruminative novel. After her mediocre university career, in which she deliberately failed to gain access to a more prestigious institution in an act of self-sabotage aimed at her mother, the protagonist goes to work as personal assistant to the pop star Aimee. As spirited as Madonna, the singer is a woman of huge energy and energy-sapping ways, who "disliked considering things from too many angles". Smith is wonderfully convincing in her portrait of celebrity. Aimee is capable of enormous generosity and of selfishness, possessed of a magpie intellect that descends on the shiniest, brightest and newest idea, and powered by white-hot self-belief. Says the narrator: "Over 10 years I saw how formidable that will could be, what it could make happen. And all the labour she put into it -- all the physical exercise, the deliberate blindness, the innocence cultivated, the very many ways she fell in and out of love -- all this came to seem to me a form of energy in itself." Soon enough, Aimee decides to build a school in west Africa, a project she conceives and then leaves others to birth and raise. The African country is unnamed, but that it is the Gambia is evident from various clues in the text ("the river split this finger of land throughout its length") as well as a reference in the acknowledgments. Smith has clearly done her research but her critique of western aid policies in developing nations -- namely, that financial aid is often ill-conceived, poorly executed and rarely sustained -- is scarcely new or unexpected. And nor is it surprising that the narrator's engagement with a poor African country and the lives of village people will bring about a shift of perspective. "Like passing through the Matrix," says one character of the journey between New York or London and the Gambian village, a remark picked up and repeated in self-congratulatory style by Aimee, who later marries Lamin, a young Gambian she brings to New York, reversing the journey through the Matrix. "Maybe luxury is the easiest Matrix to pass through," observes the narrator as she watches the young man adapt to his new circumstances as consort to a star. But elsewhere Swing Time 's Gambian characters, in particular the protagonist's friend Hawa, resist being defined by the western gaze. When Hawa marries a travelling Muslim preacher much to the narrator's dismay, Lamin's response is that perhaps Hawa's choice reflects a different kind of freedom, one roaming the land rather than stuck in a village. Exploring subtle distinctions of race and class -- this is the territory of Zadie Smith at her finest Back in London Tracey works hard, wins a part in a musical, beds and discards the male lead. Stripped of the comic qualities of, say, Howard Belsey in Smith's 2005 novel, On Beauty, the characters in Swing Time are less likable; they are deeply flawed and their flaws map on to the course of their lives. Tracey possesses a childlike vindictiveness that causes her to lash out after every disappointment, as when she effortlessly destroys the reputation of an older man who plays piano at the girls' dance class. This is a novel as much about failure as about the nature of celebrity. The self-belief that sustains Aimee is not enough to free Tracey, who is possessed of all the same talent and drive, from the constraints of her class, upbringing and education. The narrator, too, is unable ever to find the drive to realise her own talent as a singer and chooses to spend the best years of her life in service to an egotistical star. Smith touches on many modern societal flash points: western aid, mother/daughter relationships, childlessness, international adoption, sex tourism, ambition, race, class, cultural appropriation (the girls watch old minstrel shows; Aimee incorporates traditional Gambian dance moves into her on-stage routine). It is a novel of breadth rather than depth, which is not to say it lacks insight, far from it, but it did cause me to wonder what kind of reader Smith is writing for. Swing Time feels like a novel for people in their 20s, millennials perhaps, who recognise all of these issues but have yet to fully engage with them. The novel's strength lies in its unflinching portrait of friendship, driven as much by jealousy and competition as by love and loyalty. Perhaps what lies at the heart of this book is the idea that all relationships are transactional, including even those with the people who should love us the most, and especially between those of unequal wealth. Aimee is scarcely capable of disguising her unbridled desire to possess the newborn child she lifts from the arms of a poor village woman. Asks the narrator: "Did all friendships -- all relations -- involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power? Did it extend to peoples and nations or was it a thing that happened only between individuals ... What did I give Tracey? What did Tracey give me?" - Aminatta Forna.
Kirkus Review
A keen, controlled novel about dance and blackness steps onto a stage of cultural land mines.Smith, who wowed the world at 24 with her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), once again crafts quicksilver fiction around intense friendship, race, and class. She opens with a scene of that social mediafueled nightmare: public humiliation. Id lost my job, a certain version of my life, my privacy, the unnamed narrator tells us. She was put on a plane, sent back home, to England, set up with a temporary rental in St. John's Wood. From this three-paragraph prologue, the story jumps abruptly back 24 years to 1982, when the narrator, a horse-faced seven-year-old, meets Tracey, another brown girl in North West London arriving for dance class. The result is a novel-length current of competition, love, and loathing between them. Tracey has the tap-dancing talent; the narrators gifts are more subterranean: elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain. Tracey struggles for a life onstage while the narrator flies aloft, becoming personal assistant to Aimee, an Australian pop star: I scheduled abortions, hired dog walkers, ordered flowers, wrote Mothers Day cards, applied creams, administered injections, squeezed spots, and wiped very occasional break-up tears. Smith is dazzling in her specificity, evoking predicaments, worldviews, and personalities with a camera-vivid precision. The mothers of the two women cube the complexity of this work, an echo of the four protagonists in Smiths last novel, NW (2012). All their orbits are distorted by Aimee, the Madonna/Angelina Jolielike celebrity impulsively building a girls school in West Africa. The novel toggles its short chapters between decades and continents, swinging time and geography. Aimee and her entourage dabble in philanthropy; Tracey and the narrator grope toward adulthood; and Fred Astaire, dancing in blackface in Swing Time, becomes an avatar of complexity presiding over the whole thing. In her acknowledgements, Smith credits an anthropological study, Islam, Youth and Modernity in the Gambia. Its insights flare against a portrait of Aimee, on the other side of the matrix, procuring a baby as easily as she might order a limited-edition handbag from Japan. Moving, funny, and grave, this novel parses race and global politics with Fred Astaires or Michael Jackson's grace. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Smith deftly examines class, race, wealth, activism, and tribalism through the story of two girls' lifelong friendship. Both are mixed-race, growing up in an impoverished London neighborhood. Drawn together by their love of dance and old musicals, they construct a relationship that is loving but competitive. Their home lives could not be more different. Our unnamed narrator's Jamaican mother is a socially aware feminist who pushes her daughter to be more and do more. Their relationship is complex, and the daughter is drawn to her mostly absent but less judgmental father. Tracey, on the other hand, lives with her flawed but supportive mother. As the girls mature, their paths diverge. Tracey begins a promising career in theater, while our narrator attends university. Her mother finishes her own university career, divorces her husband, enters politics, and advocates for her neighbors. Meanwhile, our narrator has graduated, but Tracey never manages to escape the neighborhood. Using satire, wit, and vivid description, Smith draws listeners into this thought-provoking story. It is a book that will stay with you. VERDICT Actress Pippa Bennett-Warner expertly captures the voice of the two girls as well as the dialect and intonation of a multitude of secondary characters in this global story. Highly recommended." ["A rich and sensitive drama...for all readers": LJ 9/15/16 starred review of the Penguin hc.]-Judy Murray, Monroe Cty. Lib. Syst., MI © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.