Feel Free, Zadie Smith, Pengiun Random House
In her second collection of essays, Feel Free, Zadie Smith proves once again to be an essential writer of our times. The wide-ranging subject matter of the book shows Smith as an acute observer of the world and an astute critic of culture and art. Each piece, whether book review or acceptance speech, personal essay or travel writing, is an example of a writer on top form, and improving.
From Willesden to Manhattan via Rome, Smith examines both the avant-garde and the everyday. In over four hundred pages Smith ranges from Karl Ove Knausgaard to Key & Peele, from Billie Holiday to Beyoncé; she offers the same analytic eye to children’s films as she does to the Old Masters, and her observations leave the reader looking a little closer at the world around them. The variety found in these pages is testament to Smith’s breadth of interest — if not knowledge — and these essays are broadly interesting and informative. The book, split into five sections — In the world, In the audience, In the gallery, On the bookshelf and Feel Free — is centred around essays on film, art and literature, and is bookmarked by more personal and, inevitably, more political pieces. There is a structural movement then, of starting broad — “in the world” as Part I is titled — and narrowing in, to come out by Part V, back in the world, a little changed, a little more “free”.
The clear prose-style that has made Zadie Smith’s novels so successful is perfect in creating concise and convincing arguments in her non-fiction. Throughout there is the novelistic impulse to use one thing to discuss another; in “Meet Justin Beiber!” she uses Belieber meet-and-greets to discuss Martin Buber’s theories on meeting. As contrived as it seems, it works. Where her early fiction has been criticised for overly moralising, and, to some critics, telling rather than showing, Smith is free in the essay form to tell the reader what she thinks and to show why.
One of the things that makes these essays so fascinating and, dare I say it, readable, is Smith’s position as the self-professed “non-expert”. She refers to herself throughout as a “laywoman” and goes as far as to “recognise [herself] as an intensely naive person”. Where her last collection of essays was called Changing My Mind, this one can be thought of as Forming My Opinion. For Smith does not lecture —as an “expert” would be inclined to do— but writes with a refreshing humility, never claiming to have the “right” opinion. In being a “laywoman” interested in finding out more, Smith makes each essay a sort of journey, where the reader, like the writer, moves from interest to knowledge.
For this reason, the section of the book I found least compelling was “Part IV: On The Bookshelf”, where Smith discusses literature. As a best-selling novelist, literature is definitely one area on which Smith can write with some kind of authority. Here, she is no laywoman, she slips from someone questioning what they think, to someone asserting it. While her literary observations are by no means boring, the section does seem to drag a little when seen in the context of the wider book— the 80 pages of Harpers Columns, for instance, act more as filler than anything else. However, Smith’s role as a Creative Writing teacher at NYU can be seen in an essay like “The I Who Is Not Me”, which dissects different forms of narration and should be on the reading lists of any aspiring writers.
Smith has the writerly ability to render the academic and philosophical accessible and enjoyable. In “Windows on the Will: Anomalisa”, she uses animated films like Polar Express to discuss Schopenhauer. Even more impressively, Smith manages to discuss the political without being divisive. In “Fences: A Brexit Diary” she works through her own frustrations, but doesn’t let them cloud her judgement; to me, at least, she is passionate without being accusatory, compassionate without being condescending. In her preface, which reads like a disclaimer, Smith makes a point of noting that these essays are “the product of a bygone world”, having been written before the Trump election. They are, as the title suggests, essays filled with an optimism and a sense of freedom that —to liberal readers anyway— may not exist in the same way after the Obama administration. In “Man versus Corpus” (a personal highlight), Smith notes that “to any reader of 2013 the works of 1939 may seem innocent”. Well readers in 2018 may find these essays, ranging from 2011 to 2017, a little innocent, a tad out-dated. Sadly books like this don’t have the same instancy as tweets, but by no means does “Feel Free” lack relevance. If there is one thing that readers should take away from these essays it is “to turn from the elegiac what have we done? to the practical what can we do?”
One thing that I love about novelists writing essays, is that they bring an empathy used in their fictional creations to the real world. Early on, Smith recognises that most issues are dealt with emotionally, rather than logically: “not with logos or ethos, but pathos”. Compassion is a connecting thread throughout the thirty-one essays of this collection, Smith is not a detached intellectual but someone genuinely involved with the subject matter. This turns essays into page turners; her ever-present wit is punctuated with sincere moments of profundity and always “pathos, pathos, pathos”.
In Feel Free, readers get to see Zadie Smith as more reader than writer, and through this can learn how to keep a keen eye on the world and on culture, how to protect your individual freedoms, how to “stay woke”. The title —“borrowed” from Smith’s poet-husband Nick Laird’s brilliant poem— is particularly apt, especially when seen alongside the titles of each of the five parts. Through these titles, Smith is ultimately saying Feel Free “On the Bookshelf”, Feel Free “In the Gallery”, Feel Free “In the Audience” and Feel Free “In the World”.
by Gurnaik Johal