Novelist Zadie Smith’s first essay collection will be published this month. Illustration by André Carrilho.
ot long after publishing
White Teeth, in 2000, Zadie Smith also wrote a stern review of it for the magazine
Butterfly. Shortly after producing her second novel,
The Autograph Man, in 2002, she became a Radcliffe Institute fellow at Harvard, specializing in theories of the novel. So it could have been predicted that if she ever produced a book of essays it would show her examining the practice of fiction while being her own strictest critic. Now, in the wake of her third novel,
On Beauty, comes a collection of essays and reviews—
Changing My Mind—in which she considers the work of George Eliot, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, and David Foster Wallace (and confesses that she can’t read
White Teeth). The cleverest of the literary essays is about E. M. Forster, the structure of whose
Howards End she has already admitted borrowing for
On Beauty. But there is also journalism—a visit to bottomed-out Liberia—movie criticism from Hepburn to Visconti, some reflections on the British stand-up-comedy scene, and a sweet memoir of her English father. A while back we heard a rumor that she and her husband, Nick Laird, were collaborating on a musical about Kafka: Zadie Smith’s career is already one metamorphosis after another.
Christopher Hitchens is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.
Send comments on all Hitchens-related matters to hitchbitch@vf.com.
