Books

Zadie Smith confronts the harsh truths of the pandemic

Brief reviews of Intimations: Six Essays by Zadie Smith and That Further Shore by John D Feerick

Zadie Smith. Photograph: AP/Sergio Dionisio

Sat Oct 3 2020 - 00:00

Intimations: Six Essays

by Zadie Smith

Penguin, £5.99

In six essays written during lockdown, Zadie Smith confronts harsh truths thrown up by the pandemic and refuses the comfort of platitudes. Her writing is characteristically insightful and humane, but an elegiac ruefulness haunts these pages as she brings a novelist's attention to ordinary life under siege. Smith examines our potential for moral cowardice, how easily we refuse to recognise one another's suffering, and the useless satisfactions of being a "good person" within social structures that hold people in contempt. Several essays achieve sudden wrenching effects, but there is something heartening in the starkness of Smith's honesty. In their irresolution, these intimations offer (in book form, anyway) something many of us have been starved of in 2020: a sense of actual contact with another person. Colin Walsh

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That Further Shore: A Memoir of Irish Roots and American Promise

by John D Feerick

Fordham University Press

As a former dean of Fordham University's law school in New York, John Feerick is one of a generation of legal scholars and practitioners who made their mark on American life. In this memoir, Feerick recounts his life story – from his upbringing in an Irish-American neighbourhood in the Bronx, to his successful legal career in the private and public sphere. His role in writing the 25th amendment to the US constitution – the clause that sets out the rules on succession in the event that a president resigns or is removed from office – is of particular interest in the Trump era. Also of interest is Fordham's links to Ireland and the peace process, and Feerick's participation in the 1995 visit by president Bill Clinton to Dublin and Belfast. Suzanne Lynch