Zadie Smith's New Novel Is an Essay on Fame, Identity, and Conspiracy Theories

Her first response to the upheaval is to turn off her phone. "I had been offline for seventy-two hours and can remember feeling that this should be counted among the great examples of personal stoicism and moral endurance of our times," she comments. A page later she describes the victim of a mugging who almost drowns in the freezing waters of the Thames. She feels a kinship with this man, and it shows just how aware she is of her own lack of moral endurance.

The book that follows is the narrator's attempt to explain how she got to this point, beginning with her first ballet class at age six. The narrator's name is never divulged, and so the reader comes to see her "I" as totemic, but also a little empty. It's almost too facile, the symbolism in that: She isn't particularly important to those around her, disappears into the background, and is fundamentally alone, so she has no one to call her by her first name. But it's also appropriate. Especially in comparison to the two extreme women who have structured her life, the narrator is invisible. That invisibility gives her the freedom to ask questions, letting her become an idiosyncratic collector of experience, somewhere between chameleon and ghost.

Swing Time, Smith's fifth novel, is her first written in the first person, and her choice to yoke the book to such an elusive narrator is a risky one. But Smith has also fashioned her into an astute observer with a macabre sense of humor; she's fun, or at least fascinating, to be around. In some ways, the novel is about her perspective on Swing Time, the 1936 film starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: It includes long disquisitions about Astaire, his skill, his meaning, the Golden Age of Hollywood, and the nature of theater, music, and dance. Really, though, the novel is about swinging time: The chapters alternate between the recent past (narrator in Africa, narrator on a date) and the distant past (narrator in dance class, narrator at home with her parents). The book is propulsive because her inquiries feel at once immediate and detached, a special, private opportunity to understand.

The eccentric personalities of the narrator's female companions flesh out the book's central conceit. Tracey, the narrator's childhood best friend and contrast, is an intense creation—a pungent distillation of the type of character we rarely see in literary fiction. She's mean, she's reckless, she's bawdy, she's honest; the best analogy I can use to describe her is that she's a tragic and way less pithy Honey Boo Boo. Tracey's the boss while our narrator is an enthralled lackey; Tracey tells the stories while our narrator takes dictation. There's a rumor that her father was once Michael Jackson's backup dancer, but he definitely is in and out of prison. Their friendship fades when Tracey goes on to study at a performing arts school and the narrator goes to the local high school. (The two meet in dance class when they're children, but as most synopses of the novel note, Tracey is the prodigy while our narrator has flat feet.)

After a funny goth phase, a few years in college, and a fair amount of confusion, the narrator lands a job as the assistant to a very famous pop star named Aimee, mainly by being a bit rude when they meet. Aimee is also an outrageous creation: a Lean-In feminist with New Age beliefs and a chip on her shoulder from a poor Australian childhood, all turned up to 11. After a breakup, she asks the narrator to sleep on her floor for two weeks so she doesn't have to be alone. The narrator becomes a part of her large retinue, fills in her performance schedule, travels on her private jet, and plans her children's birthday parties. This becomes the narrator's life for a decade. After a while, she gives up even having her own apartment, because her existence is truly, fundamentally Aimee's.

The narrator doesn't seem very concerned by this state of affairs. Just as Swing Time engages with how shifts in time affect one's selfhood, it also tempers the reverie of wealth it puts on display with the dehumanization that goes into managing that wealth. Aimee's upkeep is an absurd production, but it gives insight into the deep insecurity of a service economy that exists to maintain historically unprecedented riches—the narrator's proximity to someone else's wealth strips away her own self. This reality nips at the edges of the story line: What's the point of being handsomely paid if you have little autonomy to spend the money? What's the point of having a job if you don't have a life?

When Aimee decides to open a nonprofit in an unnamed African country, it's a sign of her obliviousness, but it becomes an escape hatch for the narrator. She leaves Aimee's side and meets young teachers in a rural area. She finally builds something like a home of her own, but she also bears witness to the absurdity of the development scheme: The Illuminated Academy for Girls, named after an album of Aimee's, prompts the country's government to withdraw all funds from the surrounding town because they assume Aimee will pay for everything. The school stands gleaming on a hillside while the town around it crumbles, and Aimee begins sleeping with the math teacher.

Despite the various personalities on display, the book's analysis is anchored to the narrator's point of view. It's a departure for Smith for more reasons than the first-person narrator: Swing Time is her first book that doesn't depend on a productive mess of multiple perspectives and the first in which the linear plot is secondary, enough that demands for a clean conclusion are not overwhelming. One common complaint of Smith's early books, like White Teeth, is that they promised a plot and didn't deliver a resolution. Since then, Smith has become an adept essayist, one who is never afraid to use a well placed "I" or a personal anecdote. In important ways, Swing Time reads like an essay, and an essayistic verve keeps you going through it. The nature of the novel's conflict isn't how this assistant betrays her pop-star boss—she's so distanced from her actions that it hardly matters to her when she does do it. Rather, the narrative is more concerned with how this person, who is supremely even-keeled to the point of self-abnegation, gets to her breaking point.

The plot does hinge on a few weird elements that ultimately fall flat—a blow-up doll and a tawdry video of Tracey and the narrator in stolen lingerie—but the narrator's responses to them (rage and shamed silence, respectively) are rendered in a thoughtful way makes up for it. The narrator's self-image is lifeless, but she's obviously maintained it for so long that her struggle to reconcile it with the fact that she has needs—she wants love, she wants to support her parents, she wants to be seen—is engaging enough on its own. (The goth interlude, too, is hilarious—the reader gains more insight into her physical type than her personality, so picturing her in moody clothes and flocked hair makes clear how persuadable and fungible her constitution is.)

Certain parts of Swing Time reminded me of "The Paranoid in American Politics," a 1964 Richard Hofstadter essay, published in Harper's, a magazine where Smith was on the masthead for a few years. In it, he attempts to document a peculiar approach to the world: the conviction that someone sinister is calling the shots, somewhere far away. "I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind," he writes. He devotes quite a bit of space to the origins of conspiratorial fears of the Illuminati—Bavarian intrigue, xenophobia, rapid change. A fear of a mysterious controlling elite has been a bizarrely tough idea to shake, from Beyoncé's "you haters corny with the Illuminati mess" at the beginning of "Formation," to the conspiracy theories that hounded this year's presidential election. In Swing Time, Smith ruminates on the strange resonance of conspiracy theory, seeing commonalities in the ways the disempowered people of her unnamed African country and those of London discuss political power: They believe that there are people who run things, they are shadowy, we can't know, but we talk anyway. Magical thinking like this helps these characters establish lives even though they don't live in comfort. Exaggeration and suspiciousness are harmful in the political sphere, but fundamental to living with emotion or having relationships beyond the necessary bonds of happenstance.

By contrast, the narrator is skeptical and clear-eyed, but it has led her to distance herself from the illogical parts of life; Tracey is the Swing Time character most afflicted by the paranoid style. As she ages, her childhood imagination and brashness morph into something more sinister. She sends long, unhinged messages to her Member of Parliament and complains about how the world is controlled by the elites. She's absurd, down on her luck, and hard living. But she also has some of the inner vitality the narrator has lost along the way, insulated from the world by Aimee's wealth and her own loneliness. Tracey remembers their shared childhood in a way the narrator spent her adult life avoiding.

Smith doesn't side with the conspiracy theorists here, but she does acknowledge their desire for control in a seemingly uncontrollable world. About three-quarters of the way through the book, the story stops swinging and merges into one. Time becomes the present, and the future is unknown. The narrator realizes she has nothing: no home, no certainty, and no love. She has to seek it out for herself.