The Brooklyn Rail

The problem with Zadie Smith, argued New York’s Andrea Long Chu two years ago, is that she makes a “habit of sympathizing with the least sympathetic party in any given situation.” Smith, felt Long Chu, was a fence-sitter; the critic meant that line as a barb. But perhaps it would have been better as a blurb. For how better to describe the task of the probing essayist or the nuanced novelist: what more worthy challenge than to conjure a humanity far from one’s own, at odds with one’s convictions and values, and still to empathize? It’s every writer who should look at the world with openness, not surety, striving “to be one of the people,” as Henry James famously put it, “on whom nothing is lost.” This is one of Smith’s specialties. But it sure can get her in trouble.

Smith seems to relish the conflict. She knows that her essays, which poke fingers in nearly everyone’s eyes, are bound to win enemies, and that her “somewhat ambivalent view of human selves,” as she termed it in 2018’s Feel Free, “is wholly out of fashion.” Feel Free was an optimistic collection, a salute to the boundlessness of thought. As in 2009’s Changing My Mind, Smith embraced the “radically discontinuous” nature of her brain and fashioned a book from it, affirming the writer’s freedom to wonder without reaching fixed conclusions. “Essays,” she wrote in Feel Free, have “not a leg to stand on. All they have is their freedom.”

Dead and Alive, Smith’s new collection, is not quite the hangover the morning after, but it is a far more tempered, sober book: it is a collection which examines the burden of that freedom, and which considers the constant labor rigorous thought demands. It is a book in which Smith catches herself cheering for England in the World Cup, then wonders what life would be like if all emotions were so straightforward; in which she considers “the temptations of unfreedom” in the political sphere; and in which she picks apart “inherited concepts” and ready-made ideologies that outsource “think[ing] for us.” Freedom is hard work, Smith means to say, and it requires constant vigilance against the creep of certainty, conformity, and cliché.

Take one inherited concept: the idea that we must first identify what is risible in a work of art in order to move beyond it. Smith considers a museum show which lectures its visitors on “the Eurocentric world view” inherent in a set of paintings. Yet by so centering the structures they wish to critique, have some well-meaning curators only heightened their salience? If every work is first scrutinized for traces of Eurocentricity, we are still beginning with Europe and then working outwards—just like those parochial old painters. In a similar vein, Smith wonders whether “revisionary biographies” which furiously castigate controversial artists have unwittingly “kept the muse in her place, orbiting the great man.”

If these interventions read a tinge contra, Smith doesn’t seem to mind: her core project is to effect a more assiduous form of thought, and that means resisting “the kinds of clear, legible, ultimately deadening sentences so beloved of the group.” It also means endeavoring towards an ethics that is “not contingent but foundational.” That line is drawn from “Shibboleth,” Smith’s most provocative essay in the collection, which examines the campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. Here Smith’s tone is both defiant and exhausted (“Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naive novelist, useful idiot”) as she simultaneously calls for a ceasefire and condemns activists’ self-serving interpretations of “safety.” Her central argument—that political movements should strive for moral consistency, because it is not always easy to identify who is powerless in a given situation—holds up, but sometimes the flippancy of her language is difficult to square against her more measured writings. “One state, two states, river to the sea—in my view, their views have no real weight in this particular moment, or very little weight,” she writes: what matters is halting this “bloody murder.” There is a pragmatic logic to this, but is it really possible to separate that “bloody murder” from the political conditions which produced it? Shouldn’t it matter, at least a little, what the future states of Israel and Palestine might look like—have looked like—in assessing the conflict?

It’s a lone moment of dissonance in an otherwise exemplary collection of essays. Smith remains one of the finest critics working today, and her insights are equally prescient at grand and small scales. Her essay on Tár, a Pulitzer finalist, is a generation-defining meditation on the nascent optimism and inescapable moral compromise which befalls most youthful revolutions. “Every generation makes new rules,” Smith writes, but “every generation comes up against the persistent ethical failures of the human animal.” The radicals right the flaws of their fathers, grow fat and empowered, and then watch as new radicals reveal blind spots of their own. There was once a phrase for that—“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” an evolutionary theory which Vladimir Nabokov applied to childhood: every animal retraces the history of its species as it grows into itself. So we retrace the faults of our species, too. Smith’s tone is different here, almost elegiac. “Though it never really felt like it,” she writes later, “the time of my life has passed, is passing.”

That may sound a down note, but Smith remains a categorical optimist. Though her interventions poke holes in many sacred precepts, they evince a fundamentally hopeful premise: so long as we can identify the weak spots in our moral and intellectual lives, we can remedy them. We are free to do so; this freedom is our burden. It’s an audacious, existentialist notion, and it’s difficult to think of another writer whose voice remains so effortlessly spry and principled in pursuit of it. “I am reminded,” Smith writes late in her collection, “that you do not need to be perfectly aligned with somebody to be in their debt.” They are words worth remembering.