It’s an odd thing to be a middle-aged straight white male half way through Swing Time when a white cop in Minneapolis puts his knee on a black man’s neck for eight minutes and kills him. It’s an odd thing to finish Swing Time as protests erupt into riots in major cities throughout the U.S. And all of this against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic which already has underscored the social inequities that divide us along racial lines. I want to read this novel in an expansive and generous way. Everything Zadie Smith writes deserves such a reading; she offers us an expansive and generous view of the world. But at this historic moment, it seems as if all our civic conversations reduce to race and, largely because certain white men, most notably Donald Trump, have lobbed incendiary bombs into the middle of the conversation, its tone has turned aggressive and confrontational. At this historic moment, with our eyes so laser focused on race, it seems impossible to read Zadie Smith except with our laser focused eyes. She is a biracial author writing a novel about the experiences of a biracial narrator. We can hardly see anything else. I do finish the novel but am left with the lingering question: why would anyone else who looks like me bother with it?
This question is predicated on an assumption about the nature of white male privilege. It assumes that I have the capacity to insulate myself from this conversation altogether, in much the same way that I have the capacity to self-isolate for an indefinite period without financial hardship. In both instances, what characterizes my privilege is choice. If I don’t want to expose myself to the risk of contracting Covid-19, I can choose to withdraw into my protected world and wait for as long as I care to wait. Similarly, if I don’t care to engage myself in awkward conversations around radicalized identities, I can choose to withdraw into my protected Disney fantasy world where, deep down, we’re all the same. Once things calm down, we’ll all start singing “It’s a small world after all.”
In fact, withdrawal into a protected Disney fantasy world is the default position of white male privilege. The choice before us is not whether we should withdraw but whether we should emerge from our protected state and risk engagement. Other people don’t have such a choice. Skin colour forces engagement. I have no idea what that feels like. The closest I can get to knowing what that feels like is through acts of imagination and empathy. One such act is reading novels, especially novels written by people who don’t look like me. Reading a novel is a lot like active listening and shares the benefit that the reader/listener’s mouth is shut for the duration. I get tired of white men dominating conversations about matters that lie beyond their experience. And there is nothing more disingenuous than a liberal white man publicly working out on social media how he feels about the latest injustice he’s witnessed from his armchair.
Let’s to the novel, shall we? The title shares its name with a 1936 musical featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. One of the numbers is a Jerome Kern tune “Bojangles of Harlem” in which Astaire appears in blackface. Before we even open the book, we should be alive to the possibility that we will be invited into an uncomfortable space. On opening the book, we meet the narrator, a mixed-race London woman who goes unnamed. That fact alone should alert us that the matter of personal identity is important. Zadie Smith is too good a writer to tell us this outright, but we infer it from the absence of a name and from the narrator’s continuing struggle to function as a full-fledged adult with a modicum of personal insight.
A warning to white male readers: there is only one white male character in the novel, the narrator’s father who is a slacker and has almost no involvement in the narrator’s life. As a consequence, he has almost no involvement in the novel either. His one notable appearance is an indirect mention when the narrator’s childhood friend, Tracey, reports witnessing him copulating with a black-skinned blowup doll. Like the narrator, Tracey is unreliable, and so we have no idea if this has, in fact, happened. I only mention this as a courtesy to readers who may have an expectation of white male representation in the novel. I don’t want them to be disappointed.
Two narratives run in tandem. The first concerns a childhood friendship between the narrator and Tracey who first meet at a dance class where they are the only mixed-race children in an otherwise white cohort. The colour of their skin thrusts them together where, everything else being equal, they might have had no reason to become friends. Tracey is beautiful and talented. The narrator lacks her friend’s looks and is flat-footed. In adulthood, the narrator finds that Tracey hasn’t really lived up to her potential. She’s overweight. She’s had children by different men. Her theatrical aspirations are down the toilet. And she spends a disproportionate amount of time sending harassing emails to the narrator’s mother, the local MP.
The second narrative concerns the narrator’s employment situation. She works as a personal assistant to a white Australian pop star named Aimee who undertakes a charitable project establishing a girl’s school in an unnamed African country (probably Gambia). As one would expect, there is an underlying “white saviour” note affecting all Aimee’s dealings with the project. Of more immediate concern, however, are the unintended consequences of throwing a lot of money at a single community in a country plagued by corruption. As the narrator notes, Aimee’s personal net worth is greater than the country’s GDP. To her, the amounts in play are trivial, but to the people affected in the community, the amounts are almost unimaginable.
Zadie Smith has deprivileged the very idea of a narrative voice and she has sustained that precarious unreliability for the whole of a sprawling novel.
As the project proceeds, the narrator finds herself in conflict with her employer, but not for ideological reasons. She isn’t tied to the world that way. The source of the conflict is simpler, something far more human, a man. Aimee has fallen for Lamin, a local in the village where she is building the girl’s school. She arranges a visa so that Lamin can live with her in New York, or Australia, or wherever her global heart takes her. Lamin, however, has ambivalent feelings about twining his life with the life of a jet-setting superstar. While he is working things out, he ends up having sex with the narrator. What is effectively a random loveless act offers some finality for two indecisive people. Lamin stays in his village. The narrator is fired and returns to the London neighbourhood where she grew up.
This is emphatically not a didactic novel. There are no lessons to be learned, no Joycean epiphanies. While engaging, the narrator is not particularly likeable, and her judgment is bad enough that we cannot trust her. To the extent the novel has any point at all, that may be it. Zadie Smith has deprivileged the very idea of a narrative voice and she has sustained that precarious unreliability for the whole of a sprawling novel.
A white cop in Minneapolis puts his knee on a black man’s neck for eight minutes and kills him. We name and shame him. After public outcry, he is arrested and charged with 3rd degree murder. Who knows how this will go. It seems like we’ve traveled this way before—Rodney King, Treyvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Ahmaud Arbery. (Here in Toronto, we wait on an inquiry concerning the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet who fell 24 floors to her death during an encounter with police.) Calls for change go unheard. Police become increasingly militarized. Racist rhetoric spews from the highest political offices. Even if the perpetrator is dealt with, the structural inequities remain, guaranteeing that some variation of this scenario will play out again tomorrow or next month. To be durable, change must be both personal and structural. In a symbolic way, that may be what Zadie Smith is doing with Swing Time. She is taking a white structure—the novel—and giving it a firm shake so that it better serves her as she goes about her business of recreating her world. The structure is white no longer.
Returning to my earlier question: why would anyone else who looks like me bother with a book like this? The answer is simple but requires us to embrace a paradox. When we as white men surrender the trappings of identity that we so desperately cling to, and when we open ourselves to different ways of being in the world, we discover that, far from diminishing us, our act of surrender enriches us. Who would not want to be enriched in such a way?