Fictionally Speaking, True
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Dead and Alive, Zadie Smith, Hamish Hamilton, 2025, 352 pages, £22.00
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Three times in the English literature of the last two hundred years an unknown writer in their early twenties has sprung onto the scene with such precocity, and such an abundance of imagination, as to win them absurdly early and universal success and to establish them as a permanent household name. The first was Dickens, the second was Kipling and the third was Zadie Smith. She published White Teeth in 2000; since then, her fame hasn’t abated.
Dead and Alive is her fourth book of essays, after Changing My Mind (2009), Feel Free (2018) and the lockdown-inspired Intimations (2020). The subjects in the new book include art criticism, Tod Field’s Tár, Stormzy, Egyptian novels, black history, student protests, the late Joan Didion, the late Tory government, Tufton Street thinktanks, Donald Trump’s Gaza plan, ‘agelessness’, a childhood accident and – Smith being Smith – Northwest London. The diversity of the subject matter cannot disguise a series of unifying themes: identity, ageing, power and the intersection between them.
One of the longest and most interesting pieces is ‘Fascinated to Presume: In Defence of Fiction’. In it, Smith explains that her foremost condition for fiction is that it should inspire the belief that this ‘really happened… that what I am reading is, fictionally speaking, true’. She wonders how far her own novels achieve that sense, and whether – in using her own imagined feelings around the loss of homeland, the anxiety of assimilation and battles with faith – she succeeded in fleshing out her characters.
The ability to empathise with a character is what marks Smith out from most of her contemporaries.
She did. Few people at twenty-four can write anything other than an autobiography, but one of the remarkable things about White Teeth is how completely it avoids the usual debutant’s trap. Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones are fifty years older than the author and with completely different life experiences. They succeed as characters because, though she makes them ‘true’ and individual in themselves, she does not completely efface herself from them. She gives her own imagined feelings to her characters rather than doing what most novelists do, and simply putting herself on the page. The ability to empathise with a character – even one with whom she has nothing in common – is what marks Smith out from most of her contemporaries, and there is a significance behind the characters she chooses to interiorise.
Time and again in this book she reminds us of the importance of genuine representation, not only in fiction but in history and art. When she was a child in London in 1985 there was no ‘black girl magic’; black women writers were unheard of in school or the papers or on TV; at Cambridge, she never once studied a black or Asian writer. As such it was thrilling for her in the 1980s and 90s to discover Toni Morrison’s novels or Gretchen Gerzina’s Black England because books like these convinced her that a multiracial Britain did exist and was worth writing a comic novel about. Without these seeds of inspiration, it is possible that the novels of Zadie Smith might not have burgeoned. Two complimentary essays, prefaces to Black England and to Black Manhattan, emphasise the importance of a racially inclusive history. History is not something to be exclusivised; as she suggests in an essay on Charlotte Beradt, the divvying up of human beings into various uncrossable categories with segregated histories is the tool of authoritarians and fascists; that is not as clichéd as it sounds.
What is the solution, then? How can we universalise representation in history or art or fiction? For Smith, it goes back to her vocation as a novelist, and to the importance of living inside the people she writes about. She points to her own attempts in her novels to humanise various ‘types’, so that ‘the Black Youth’ becomes Felix in NW (2012) and ‘the Privileged White Man’ becomes Howard in On Beauty (2005). She makes them ‘fictionally speaking, true’.
Smith turns fifty this year and a streak of mid-life nostalgia penetrates these essays. ‘Some Notes on Mediated Time’ makes the familiar argument that social media and the internet are sapping our lives and our sense of time; she contrasts them unfavourably with the TV of her childhood, which, she says, told stories instead of soundbites. Her view of the VHS era is too rose-tinted to be taken entirely seriously – in the 1980s, we are told, ‘Time did not yet mean money’ – but she is wry and self-aware enough not to become fogeyish, and she raises a political dimension to the social-media craze which is not often discussed, namely the monetisation of time. ‘The forces of capital have always despised the commons, precisely because you can’t monetize it, and that their signature move has always been to denigrate whatever is shared and free (in this case, reality itself, time itself, which was designated as impossibly, unliveably boring, around 2008).’ For Smith, ageing and the generation gap are inherently political.
Smith is an excellent dissector of power and identity, but conventional party politics are not in her line.
It is her most explicitly political essays that are the most interesting but also the most nebulous. A rightly outraged essay on Trump’s Gaza plan situates the AI video of it as part of an ‘American Imagery’, in which ‘there is and always has been a subcategory of people in this world who are not only born to suffer but who are habituated to it’ because ‘in the colonial imagination the wretched are a species apart’ – this, she says, is as true of Palestinians today as it was of Algerians sixty years ago. Her careful, second-by-second description of the AI video itself would be comic if the subject-matter were not so appalling. By contrast, there is a piece, written just before the 2024 General Election, on the decaying and soon-to-be evicted Conservative government, but it contributes nothing that hasn’t already been said by James O’Brien or Rory Stewart. Smith is an excellent dissector of power and identity, but conventional party politics are not in her line.
The best essays in the book, on the whole, are the literary ones. The criticism sings. Her obvious joy in literature and in literary personalities might, if she wrote just a collection of critical essays, make for her very best book. In Dead and Alive, in the short section titled ‘Mourning’, she offers elegies on late writers Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Martin Amis and Hilary Mantel. She has the literary critic’s gift of summing up an author’s body of work in a single line. For example: ‘It is a peculiarly of Joan Didion’s work that her most ironic formulations are now read as sincere, and her sincerest provocations taken with a large pinch of salt.’
Anecdotal evidence adds intimacy. During her first meeting with Hilary Mantel – which she orchestrated, using a novelist’s privilege to secure the email address – she was mortified to discovered that ‘the prospect of an upstart girl novelist interviewing her for the Paris Review was not, for Hilary, a dream come true’. She is also rare among critics for taking no account of politics in her criticism. She disagreed with Amis on ‘The War on Terror’ and with Roth on women, but she can laud one as ‘England’s only living writer’ and the other as ‘one of the most alive, the most conscious, people I ever met’. And the essay on creative writing, which gives several sentence-by-sentence analyses of James Baldwin, is, in spite of the slew of critical studies of him that emerged from last year’s centenary, one of the best pieces on him in recent years, taking a scalpel to his paradoxical attempts ‘to explore the political, the personal, the existential, and even the metaphysical simultaneously – yet also refuse to swear allegiance to any one of them’.
It is probably not a coincidence that the literary essays are also among the shortest. The longer essays tend to be the worst as she runs out of things to say and resorts to gift-card platitudes like this: ‘that’s one of the gifts we humans can give each other: pleasure.’ Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait is reviewed with occasional insight but more often in the manner of a harried examinee who doesn’t quite know what to say about a book but remembers large slabs of quotation and vaguely what happens in it. Five pages into the eighteen-page review of Tár, I went for a walk, mentally. A more judicious editor might have pruned Dead and Alive and removed several of the lacklustre pieces. Even in its current form, though, it remains lucid, eclectic, passionate and thought-provoking – Smith’s best book of non-fiction to date.
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Image credit: Ben Bailey-Smith
Hassan Akram studies History and Politics at the University of Oxford and writes for Literary Review and The Times Literary Supplement.
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