What do we do, how do we respond, when we are violently shaken out of time, when we lose the thread of our own lives, when we are so certain of the narrative of our life and then are suddenly, jarringly, shaken loose? How do we reconcile, what are the lies and myths we tell ourselves, to try and reclaim our time? And when do those lies hurt us and when do they help us find our footing again? And this one is about having been removed from time.” Swing Time is a novel that is fundamentally concerned with this question. And the consequences of that are pretty much unending. But it would’ve gone a certain way, and we were removed from that timeline, placed somewhere entirely different, and radically disrupted. We had a life in one place and it would have continued and who knows what would have happened-nobody knows. In an interview in T: The New York Times Style Magazine this past fall, Smith noted, “It just seemed to me that what was done to black people, historically, was to take them out of the time of their life. “When I waved at those two girls…I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that they were timeless symbols of girlhood…I knew it couldn’t possibly be the case but I had no other way of thinking of them.” What person on earth doesn’t feel this way?” But the narrator is unable to place the two girls before her in any time. Of their friendship, she notes, “We thought we were products of a particular moment, because as well as our old musicals, we liked things like Ghostbusters and Dallas. “They were out at the edge of the world, or of the world I knew, and watching them, I realized it was…almost impossible for me to imagine what time felt like for them, out here.” The girls inevitably remind the narrator of her own lost, best friend, Tracey, who angrily haunts the novel, forever resisting the narrator’s attempts to regulate her to incorporeality.

“They looked like best friends,” she notes-that “looked” suggesting the mysteries of friendship that the novel has been dedicated to up until that point. M idway through Zadie Smith’s new novel, Swing Time, the unnamed narrator watches two girls walk “hand in hand” down a dusty road in an anonymous, fictionalized African country.

Zadie smith swing time review