A Novelist’s Double Life

When Zadie Smith finished her most recent novel, On Beauty, she drank a bottle of wine, lay down among the rotting apples in her garden, and cried. That was more than four years ago. Since then Smith has taught writing at Columbia University in New York, lived in Italy, and, most recently, given birth to a girl, Katherine. What she hasn't done is write another novel.

Which doesn't mean she's stopped writing. Instead, she's quietly been establishing herself as one of the most penetrating literary critics of our time. In pieces for The New York Review of Books and The Guardian, she's championed "difficult" writers such as Kafka, David Foster Wallace, and the experimental novelist Tom McCarthy. These essays, along with some other previously published pieces on travel, movies, and her family, are collected in her frustrating new book, Changing My Mind.

I mean frustrating as the highest praise. Smith's graceful, limber prose exploring Forster, Nabokov, and Hurston makes you want to read, or reread, their fiction. But, even more, you want to read Smith's. You want to see her put into action the ideas she develops, especially because the most interesting pieces find her torn between two approaches. "In my own reading life, I've been pulled in first one direction, then the other," she writes in an essay comparing Nabokov and Barthes. "On the one hand there is Barthes's radical invocation of reader's rights…on the other, Nabokov's bold assertion of authorial privilege." As a writer, she is Nabokovian in her belief that writing is an "intentional directional act." As a reader, she's a Barthesian. In an essay called "Fail Better," not included in the collection, Smith wrote that "reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing." This examination of the power struggle between writer and reader makes for an engaging essay, but you still want to turn the page and see her working it out for herself.

Often when serious critics write fiction, their attempts validate the idea that those who can, do, and those who can't, criticize those who can. But Smith has already established her bona fides with White Teeth, The Autograph Man, and On Beauty. That said, she insists that she's a different writer from the 21-year-old who wrote White Teeth. "I don't recognize that writer anymore, and I find her idea of the novel oppressive, alien, useless," she writes about her younger self, and claims that she once tried to read her first novel, but was "overwhelmed with nausea" after 10 sentences, which she attributes to having written it at such a young age. Since it seems unlikely a sequel, or anything that resembles her past work, is forthcoming, it remains to be seen how her current ideas will resolve themselves in a novel.

Smith is slightly elusive on the subject of her next work of fiction. "I don't like to write something unless I feel I really must," she said on the phone from London, where she was well into her ninth month of pregnancy with Katherine. She has the beginning of a novel she started several years ago, but then she got "a bit stuck" and never finished. "You can be not in the mood for writing fiction," she says. "It's quite hard to write when your mind is elsewhere. My father died, I moved to Italy—life things got in the way." She says she's "a lot more tentative and shy" a writer than she was when she wrote White Teeth: "I assumed I had enough energy to describe everything." She may now know her limits, but here's hoping we don't have to wait too much longer before she summons the courage to test them again.