Zadie Smith leaves no cultural stone unturned

While Zadie Smith’s novels, from White Teeth to Swing Time, examine the contours of self and society, her brilliant and evocative essays shine a radiant, sometimes glaring, light on the shortcomings, the hopes, and the ragged joys of our culture. The essays in her new collection, mostly previously published in the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker, are nicely divided into five sections—“In the World,” “In the Audi­ence,” “In the Gallery,” “On the Book­shelf,” and “Feel Free”—that ex­plore the ways that we create our feelings of freedom, especially through social organizations or art, and the ways such feelings can bind us.

Smith candidly reflects on a friend’s comment that Smith’s writing has thus far been a “fifteen-year psychodrama.” After living with that comment echoing through her psyche for a few days, Smith concludes that perhaps there is some truth to it. Thinking of the essays she’s selected for Feel Free, she considers the manner in which her writing frees her, and she also shares the hopes that reading her writing will allow others to feel free:

Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self. The first is never wholly mine; the second I can only ever know in a partial sense; the third is a malleable and improvised response to the previous two . . . It’s this self . . . that I try to write from and to. My hope is for a reader who, like the author, often wonders how free she really is, and who takes it for granted that reading involves all the same liberties and exigencies as writing.