![]() ![]() Abandoning the arch omniscience of her previous novels in favor of a first-person voice allows Smith to inhabit a character her earlier narrators might have regarded from an amused distance. Viewing a Fred Astaire routine in which the central figure’s projected silhouettes, triple and towering, dance at his back, the novel’s unnamed narrator grasps “that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own.” Like the umbral tap troupe onscreen, she muses, “I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.”Īs in the Astaire clip, Swing Time’s supporting player dwarfs its main act. Swing Time, Zadie Smith’s fifth novel, opens on the type of ecstatic insight that more often ends a work of fiction. The Nicholas Brothers in Stormy Weather (1943) ![]() In Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, a young woman explores her racial identity through a love of dance-and finds a different kind of history, one that is barely written down. ![]()
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