ESSAYS: Changing My Mind: Occasional EssaysBy Zadie Smith, Hamish Hamilton, 308pp, £20
THE NOVELIST and critic Geoff Dyer once claimed that his fiction was merely a ruse to get somebody, some day, to publish a collection of his essays. Novels were all well and good, but the real work of style and thought, invention and adventure, was being done secretly in plain sight, dispersed among his book reviews, columns, travel pieces and artist profiles. It's a compelling thought, the notion that you might amass an actual oeuvre out of workaday journalism or passing enthusiasms attached to modest word counts. Zadie Smith does not seem to share the fantasy. Changing My Mind, she says in the foreword to her first collection of essays, was written without her knowledge, casually composed "in response to the requests that came in now and then".
This is perhaps one reason why Smith rarely dazzles as an essayist – there is not much here of Susan Sontag's haughty rigour, or the brittle, neurasthenic voice of Joan Didion. Her critical writing can sound remarkably conventional, and at times clunky, as in her overly schematic setting of Roland Barthes's Death of the Authoragainst the inviolable ego of Vladimir Nabokov. She nods dutifully to George Eliot, EM Forster and Martin Amis, predictably overestimates Philip Larkin and, like many an English writer approaching middle age, feels duty-bound to traduce the Francophone intellectual fads of her youth.
But what Smith also rejects is the essayist’s typical egotism; the urge to impose the sovereign “I”, or dispatch a rival with polemic elan, seems absent from her critical and journalistic repertoire. For a novelist so energetically hyped at the start of her career, and so regularly disparaged since, she has an admirably democratic attitude to contemporary fiction.
Among her prominent detractors has been the critic James Wood, an aesthetic conservative for whom Smith is a "hysterical realist": a belated postmodernist addicted to mere information and formal play at the expense of character-building. The most ambitious essay in this collection is in part an overdue riposte to Wood's prissy review of Smith's second novel, The Autograph Man, in 2002. Two Directions for the Novelpits Joseph O'Neill's "lyrical realist" Netherland– a book Smith actually admires for its traditional narrative virtues – against Tom McCarthy's antic experimental novel Remainder, and argues persuasively for the latter as a model for the fiction of our century. Netherland is "perfectly done – in a sense, that's the problem"; the decentred allegory of Remainder "works by accumulation and repetition, closing in on its subject in ever-decreasing revolutions".
The figure who ghosted the Smith-Wood spat was David Foster Wallace: the subject here of a posthumous and heartfelt essay that shows just how wrong Wood was about the motives of the "hysterical realists". In a close reading of Foster Wallace's short-story collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, Smith discovers a writer striving towards forms that would match his humane and democratic vision of what fiction could be. For sure, his writing was by turns flashy and tortuous; but at its heart was an urge to reproduce the rhythms of another person's thought, and to let the reader feel those rhythms in a way that was intimate and estranging at the same time. Foster Wallace, Smith concludes, was "clever enough to realize that cleverness wasnt enough".
She makes him sound, in fact, like George Eliot: an overtly intellectual novelist whom Smith prizes for her emotionally capacious sense of which subjects or characters matter in a novel. The title Changing My Mindsuggests a writer at ease with her own internal conflicts, but it's better read as a clue to Smith's novelistic desire to exchange her mind for that of someone else. Whether writing about Zora Neal Hurston, 50 Cent, her brother's comedy career or her father's long-unspoken guilt about the deaths of fellow soldiers in the second World War, Smith is a modest, even devoted, chronicler of the lives and works of others. It's a skill that perhaps derives from her youthful worship of Golden Age movie stars, which she explores in an essay on Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo – as Hepburn puts it in The Philadelphia Story, "The time to make your mind up about people is never".
Brian Dillon's Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Liveswas published last year by Penguin Ireland
