![]() ![]() She is a spectacular essayist - even better, I’d say, than as a novelist - who has written searchingly about race and culture, identity and place and family. Smith is aware of such criticism, yet even as she grapples with it she maintains the interiority that makes essays distinct. (Think of Frieda Hughes’ “ Forty-Five,” 45 poems published around her 45th birthday, or Heidi Julavits’ mash-up diary “ The Folded Clock.”) The essential form of this moment, it appears, is the essay, which has proliferated like a contagion of its own. There are certain books that take their form from circumstance: the manner - or even the moment - in which they were composed. But really, her subject is the strange, dislocated present we occupy. ![]() ![]() Smith is referring in part to what she describes (invoking herself in the third person) as “the social protections of her youth, which had not seemed to her dreams, but rather mundane realities - universal health care, free university education, decent public housing - all now recast as revolutionary concepts” in America, where the British-born author lives part of the year. “What modest dreamers we have become,” Zadie Smith writes midway through her new book, “ Intimations,” which gathers six short essays that seek to reckon with the experience of pandemic life. ![]() If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores. ![]()
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