As the narrator’s personal life is eclipsed more and more by Aimee, she wrestles with her past, her family, and her friendship with Tracey. She is dislocated by her own power: “To Aimee poverty was one of the world’s sloppy errors, one among many, which might be easily corrected if only people would bring to the problem the focus she brought to everything.”Īimee’s impulse to build a school in West Africa sends the narrator to an unfamiliar continent, where she encounters new people and new rhythms. Aimee is like modern royalty: rich and talented, but also arrogant and out of touch with the real world. In her twenties, she gets a job as a personal assistant to a world-famous pop star, Aimee, who in some ways resembles Madonna.

The chapters alternate between the narrator’s youth and her early adulthood. These four women’s relationships are tested by the girls’ adolescent years, by their emerging adulthood, and by the forces of race and class. While Tracey’s white mother is audacious, the narrator’s mother is an outspoken black feminist who spends more time reading than mothering. Tracey has more ability and grace than the narrator, who is more introspective and brooding, and their complicated friendship exists in a suspended tension between competition and intimacy: “ wanted to see a dancer on stage, sweating, real, not done up in top hat and tails. They imagine their futures full of glamorous stardom, fantasies that act as a respite from their gritty neighborhood.īut only one of them has enough talent to realistically pursue dance. Both girls are of mixed race, and both dream of the stage. We quickly leap back several decades to when the narrator was a young girl, when she befriends another young girl named Tracey at a dance class in Northwest London in the early 1980s. She is contemplative and sulky, and her dire circumstances establish a suspense that builds throughout the book we want to know what happened to her. The opening pages introduce us to an unnamed narrator (who remains nameless throughout the novel), a woman who has just lost her job as well as her privacy through some kind of public humiliation. Swing Time, Smith’s latest novel, is a fresh continuation of that tradition, with rich characters, complex relationships, and beautiful truths about the passage of time.

In the years since White Teeth, Smith has experimented with her voice, and each of her subsequent books has been a transformation of narrative style while she continues to explore themes of family, race, class, and friendship. Zadie Smith’s prose hummed with energy, syntactic acuity, and graceful, rhythmic precision. I remember thinking that I had never read anything quite like White Teeth.

Swing time novel