At the beginning of an essay from this new collection – her third (or perhaps fourth, if you count the boutique volume of pandemic pieces, Intimations, from 2020) – Zadie Smith writes: “I’ve always been aware of being an inconsistent personality.” In her previous essay collections, Smith made a great virtue of being inconsistent. She strove to turn “it’s complicated” from an admission of intellectual defeat into an ethical principle – even a method. She allowed her youthful gaucheries and mature self-contradictions to stand, and even to become the bases for supple arguments about art, self, race, politics, culture. She was, in other words, a liberal essayist in the great tradition. Is she still?
Dead and Alive has a ragbag quality. Smith seems aware of this. In her foreword she calls it “a book of essays on many different topics” and calls this “a tricky proposition”. She means tricky for the reader: where do you start? Whatever you do, Smith insists twice that “you are welcome” and “the door is open”. There is an air of anxiety about this foreword. It inaugurates a book that does not operate with the confident uncertainty of Smith’s best essays, but instead is corroded throughout by a much deeper set of uncertainties. They are uncertainties about the contexts in which Smith writes.
In other words, whether Smith knows it or not, Dead and Alive is a book about the crumbling confidence of the Western liberal elite. To read it is to watch a long-established mode of elite liberalism struggle and largely fail to define itself against freshly empowered enemies on the right and on the left.
“[I]t seems to be my destiny to accept literary awards at times of world historical disaster,” Smith said, accepting an award from the Kenyon Review on November 8th, 2024, “three days after”, as she reminds us, “the American election”. Donald Trump is excoriated in two essays here, indirectly in The Dream of the Raised Arm and directly in Trump Gaza Number One (“A general concept of the human does not exist for this White House”).
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Was Trump’s return to power a “world historical disaster”? I’d say the jury’s still out on that one, actually. When Smith writes about an actual world historical disaster – Gaza – her liberal commitment to freedom and uncertainty fails the test completely. Language, Smith says, is the problem – the shibboleth words and slogans that partition a moral reality and deliver us from empathy and thought (the piece is called Shibboleth). It’s a good point. But it’s not the point to make about Gaza. Like a good liberal, Smith refuses to take a side, an invites us to call her what we will – “toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot”. She ends: “It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead.” To which the only possible response can be: then why are we reading your essay about it?
Not taking a side on Israel/Palestine used to count, in certain quarters, as mature liberal wisdom. This is the intellectual heritage that Smith means to invoke in Shibboleth. But mature liberal wisdom has long since started to look like a basic moral vacuity. The old principled inconsistency, having so signally failed to withstand assaults from right-wing populists and online progressives, now looks like plain old inconsistency. “It’s complicated” now looks like – is – evasiveness.
Those online progressives have been bugging Smith, too. She writes at length about Todd Field’s film Tár, using a series of jokey reflections on generational habits and assumptions to hold the moral force of “woke” arguments at arm’s length. It’s generational!
In that piece Smith calls herself Gen X – though to me she’s always seemed like a classic millennial. She has never sounded more millennial than when she writes of her personality that it is “severely distorted, moment by moment, by my desire to seem a certain way”. Smith’s writing, too, has become increasingly distorted. Personality, she writes, “is a painful negotiation” between “how we think we’re coming across, how we want to come across and how we actually come across”.
There are other ways to think about personality – ways that don’t, for instance, found themselves on the concept of “coming across” at all. Beyond that: you don’t worry about how you’re coming across when you have something important to say; and you don’t worry about how you’re coming across when you’re talking to people you trust.
The liberal context that sustained the first two decades of Smith’s stellar career is evaporating around her. Deprived of that context, she is no longer sure that she has anything important to say. More dangerously still, she no longer trusts her readership to get what she is saying. How is she coming across? Worried. But she’s hardly alone in that.
Kevin Power is assistant professor in English at Trinity College Dublin
