Tracey is poorer - she lives in a worse London estate than the narrator - but her mother spends all her money on pleasing the child, on her dance classes, on her material happiness. The two girls recognize something in each other in the dance classes they attend as little girls, and they stick together, though their home lives, the very values they are being taught, seem to be incredibly different. Her best friend Tracey is also of mixed-race parents, but in her case, her mother is white and her father Black (and also Jamaican). She is mixed-race, her mother Jamaican and Black and her father British and white. She is in her early thirties at the time of her narration and is looking back over the years of her life, going back and forth between her childhood and her recent past. All of which is to say that Swing Time is surprising - not that it is anything less than excellent.Īn unnamed narrator is not quite at the heart of the novel - that belongs to her childhood best friend, Tracey - but she is, nevertheless, the vehicle through which we learn about the other characters, the passage of time, and the ideas the book grapples with. Paragraphs can last up to a page in length, the narration is first person, and there is a Jamesian quality to some of the sentences that is unexpected for Smith, who is an excellent wordsmith and always has been but who has tended to give her characters voice through their words more often than through their internal narration. The most noticeable thing about Swing Time, at least for a longtime reader of Smith’s work, is how much of it defies the old writing workshop adage - it tells as often as, if not more than, it shows.

Swing Time by Zadie Smith is a magnificent, mature novel, but one that reads differently than the others previous books (which have all been incredible, each in its own way). It is hard, but it is necessary, because if there is one thing that will get many of us through the next four years, it is art: appreciating it, creating it, continuing to give it life.

It is hard to write a review of a novel about brown women, white women, black women, dance, time, loneliness, and love. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.