more about zadie

Evidently  Zadie Smith will be reviewing new books in upcoming issues of Harper’s. How pleasant. She recently went on the Leonard Lopate Show and talked about this, as well as her latest book, Changing My Mind. Worth a listen if you can find the time, though you know how it goes with podcasts.

I haven’t been updating as frequently as I would like, and part of that comes from losing the habit over the holidays. That will change soon.

zadie smith a go go

Finished  Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind the other day. It was a nice, enjoyable read. I’ll leave you now with a David Foster Wallace quote that Smith quotes in her essay on Brief Interviews with Hideous Men:

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate…from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. the other half is to dramatize the fact that we still ‘are’ human beings, now.”

Though they aren’t her words, that first line of the quote pretty much sums up her book’s message for me.

goodbye invisible

I’m finally done with Invisible, thank goodness. Not a fan. It was simultaneously better and worse than The New York Trilogy, but mostly it was more of the same, just less exciting (not that The New York Trilogy is very exciting). I’ve already talked a lot about it (here and here and here), so I won’t bother to repeat myself. Normally I would have put the book down, but I wanted to get to the end — I knew he was going to throw something in there, some twist that would (in his eyes at least) tie everything up in one way or another. And, it was definitely there, like a bad M. Night Shyamalan movie. Overall the book felt like a collection of scraps that didn’t really work on their own  forced into a semblance of a novel. On the surface everything a reader of serious fiction would want was there — everything except depth.

I’m also very close to finishing the Zadie Smith book, which I recommend. At times her thinking can be a little inchoate and scattered, but not ever to the extent where you doubt her in what she’s saying. The last chapter on David Foster Wallace is extremely engaging.