'White Teeth' author visits

Writer speaks about what it's like to have book published at 24

JERI KRENTZ

Reading Life Editor

Writing a novel at such a young age was "a kind of high wire act," Zadie Smith told an audience at Davidson College Wednesday night.

Smith, who was born in northwest London in 1975, began writing her first novel, "White Teeth," while studying English literature at Cambridge University. She was 24 when the book was published to rave reviews.

Now ranked among today's finest writers, Smith appeared at Davidson to give the school's annual Reynolds Lecture.

She began the evening with a 30-minute reading from her third novel, "On Beauty," which came out last year. The book won the Orange Prize for Fiction; several publications, including the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post, named it one of the Best Books of the Year.

Smith chose the chapter where Howard, a 57-year-old married professor, accompanies Victoria, his 19-year-old student, to a college dinner.

The evening includes a glee club performance and Howard, after listening to "Pride (In the Name of Love)," succumbs to uncontrollable laughter.

After her reading, Smith sat in an easy chair on stage and answered questions about her characters, about writing and about E.M. Forster's influence. She discussed Kiki and her "spellbinding bosom" and Victoria's beauty and false consciousness.

And she talked about herself: how she used to be 95 pounds heavier, how she spent her time reading -- not dating -- as a teen, how she entered Cambridge with dreams of being an author.

When asked which writers she would most like to meet, Smith listed Shakespeare, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov.

"I would have loved to have met Nabokov," she said. "Not that he would have liked me much."