Zadie Smith’s new book of essays entitled Intimations is a collection of non-fiction musings and analyses of the Covid-era experience - the epidemiological and the political - and its effects on creative productivity. Some readers might expect the past year-and-a-half to be ideal for people like writers who work alone and, in theory, have the freedom to follow their muse and tailor their lives to their own dictates. But artists are also bellwethers of the tenor of their times and Smith lists the same issues of self-doubt and perplexity that the non-creative world encountered, as well as those peculiar to the demands of her craft.
After dramatic early success and despite her misgivings, Smith has been compared with such literary luminaries as Charles Dickens, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and John Irving... Her first novel “White Teeth” (2000) was a bestseller and garnered much critical acclaim as a novel about both historical and modern London multicultural life. Her awards include Granta’s 20 Best Young Authors; Time Magazine’s 100 best English-language novels published from 1923 to 2006; both long and shortlisting for the Man Booker Prize; and an early-career inclusion into the Royal Society of Literature.
Intimations addresses the author’s response to what happened in the first year of the Covid era; responses that will ring familiar to most readers, as well as those from her perspective as an established artist and celebrity and through her lens as a European non-native resident of the United States. Covid brought the world into “a state of war” which transformed its participants and proliferated “strange inversions,” she confirms, where people “thanked God for ‘essential’ workers they once considered lowly” (p16). She notes the “particularly American” incongruity of individual States bidding for badly-needed medical equipment as if on eBay, and also observes that the pandemic is indeed a plague and one that is not immune to “centuries of American hierarchies” in that black and brown populations and the poor were dying at twice the rate of the white and Asian populace (p15). Also peculiarly American is the role of money in the desire to “lengthen the distance between the dates on our birth certificates and the ones on our tombstones” (p13). In the Covid era this resulted in unequal health outcomes, according to Smith, in part because plagues in general are considered “insufficiently hierarchical” and “too inattentive to income disparity,” and thus have been relegated to history in the American imagination (p14). Smith has clear opinions on how American leadership handled the problem during the first year of the crisis which she treats obliquely by not naming names. Somehow her opinions ring louder by this lack of any reference by name or position to whom she’s referring, and the personages to whom she alludes seem readily apparent.
In the book we learn about what writing in general means to her, as well as its meaning at this historic juncture in time; something that is routinely described as creative but to her is something with more heft (“this (creative) has never struck me as the correct word...Writing is control”) (p6). What Smith was doing in 2020 was what the rest of us were doing: trying to wrest a sense of personal agency from events that were wreaking havoc on any sense of normalcy. But writing, we learn, is a flawed means of achieving this; Smith states that writing is “to swim in an ocean of hypocrisies, moment by moment”... a temporary delusion that creates a mold “into which you pour everything you can’t give shape to in life” (p8). If this applies to the comparatively benign “before times” of the pandemic, is there enough solace in her craft to contain the shapelessness of an invisible hundred-year epidemic? Smith continues to outline the particular dilemmas of the moment for artists, and writers in particular, who are no less subject to the slings and arrows of the Covid fortunes cast upon the rest of humanity, and are sources who are looked to for their skills in articulation. Smith is forthright in citing art’s “dubious relation to necessity” and admits that an attempt to connect the artist’s labor with the work of truly laboring people is frequently made but always strikes her as “tenuous” (p22). Covid has become the great equalizer in that “the rest of us now have the artist’s question: time and what to do with it” (p23). The author finds scant relief in the vessel of her writing, offering that it is a merely a response to personal failings and “just something to do” (p26). This seems a tad harsh given that the shapeless origins of the author’s early product, the writing itself, often results in a final product that helps us to decipher and put into context the threads and substance of our times. In the meantime, as we banged on pots to let front-line medical staff know we saluted them, Smith voiced our fears as we all tried gamely to continue our pre-pandemic level of productivity (“in the first week I found out how much of my old life was about hiding from life...self-implemented schedules were in effect a dry, sad, small idea of a life...”) (p24). Yes, there are moments when the author appears to be engaging in some wallowing, but 2020 was not an ordinary year whatsoever, when many hospital staff were parts of teams that resorted to formulated decision trees to determine who got a ventilator and who was on their own—and frequently relegated to departing this life. It is against this complete antithesis of “formless or shapeless” work that Smith is voicing her misgivings.
- Richard P., West Windsor Branch
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