Outward-facing, open-hearted and always attentive, her descriptions of people she knows from her neighbourhood – for instance, Ben the masseur – strike an even-tempered tone between plaintive and droll. Smith revels in the beckoning of uncertainty and the weighing up of possibilities before banishing unbidden intrusions of baggy conjecture to the back door. She writes as if she’s probing her internal monologue responses and flexing her muscles before setting out on her modest epiphanies.
She eschews fervent and splenetic argument, the default online chatter mode. Smith has never been one for brow-beating or knee-jerk disembowelling. It was always here, albeit obscured and denied, but now everybody can see it.” Here she notes that “Death has come to America. Her musings on the plague of racism in the States and the police killing of George Floyd exhibit an actively curious, ferocious mind working at full pelt. Regarding style, there can be no quibbling with this writer’s contemplative and circumspect cadences this is gleaming, wry, and crisp prose, which wears its erudition lightly but takes flight on both every day and lofty matters. An exchange with an exuberant IT dude at her university blooms into a digression on the ‘black nerd’ and the style of youth, a “manifestation of spirit” that has been “radically interrupted” by the virus. The awkward and stilted dialogue with her mother on social-distancing video calls is a launch into how communication has changed. She finds herself checking her privilege at a fast-food restaurant. She considers online memes in this time of COVID-19.
The essays are also nimble ruminations on vignettes from her daily life. Intimations is as personal as it is political, covering Trump, Black Lives Matter, and Dominic Cummings’ breaking of his own Lock Down rules. Her new collection of meditations on this peculiar time of liberty and captivity beguiles with its meticulous thought patterns, alluring felicities and rhapsodic turns of phrase. Fortunately, the New York-based British author Zadie Smith is as deft an essayist as she is a novelist. A global pandemic and a lock down forcing us to re-examine and reconfigure our parameters of normality would seem tailor-made for analysis via the interrogative gaze of the essay genre.
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