Azadie Adominique Nabokov Smith, New York, 2009
"Changing My Mind" is a very good title for a collection of essays, a genre in which one should be trying out or experimenting with ideas. However, the implication is not as simple as it seems. "I have changed my mind" is a sentence that often leads to stasis, as if we only change our minds once and then must arrive at some settled wisdom, happy to deny our past mistakes and move on denying them. Zadie Smith will have none of that. In the preface to her intelligent and fast-moving book, she cheerfully states: "Ideological inconsistency is practically an article of faith for me," and in an epigraph, she quotes Katharine Hepburn alias Tracy Lord in *The Philadelphia Story*: "The time to mend one's mind till over men is never!"
"Ideological inconsistency" may be a bit harder when the author achieves it, possibly almost as difficult as ideological consistency—Hepburn’s quote, however, is perfect. Zadie Smith is not about contradiction, and she doesn't really change her mind; she just refuses to pin it down. Her mind has shifting colors, registers, and interests, and in these pages, we get to see these elements as they move. We watch her at work and at play as she thinks about books, movies, travel, language, home, history, Mont Blanc fountain pens, her father, a work by David Foster Wallace. She is extremely funny, though sometimes claiming she isn't, and she has an extraordinary ability to precisely examine disheartening truths without losing heart. She has a varied sense of humor, but it is true to itself.
Reading these essays, I began to understand her relationship to the work of E.M. Forster, and not just because she writes so well about him in one of the pieces collected here, first published in these pages. Forster, she says, was "a tricky fellow," a sentence that surely shows a friendly interest in the man and writer but doesn't seem to resonate much with Forster's restraint or middling style. A motto from *Where Angels Fear to Tread* graces Smith's first novel, *White Teeth*, and her third, *On Beauty*, begins with a turn borrowed from *Howards End*. On the acknowledgments page of this book, she writes of her "love for E.M. Forster, to whom all my fiction owes, one way or another." I doubted neither the love nor the debt when reading these books, but the connection between writer and writer seemed tenuous to me, an abstraction I couldn't find concretized on the page. That was either because I didn't search carefully enough or think obliquely enough.
*On Beauty* has a lyrically awkward scene that serves as a perfect example of this link, and that is an unmistakable trace set firmly in the middle of the it—though not so indelible that I wouldn't miss it...
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