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Pandemic reflections and street encounters from a writer whose self-doubt is central to her talent
There are probably going to be a lot of lockdown books. Or maybe not: maybe as the new world becomes the new normal we’ll want to hurry forward, away from our first intuitions of change, shedding them behind us because nothing’s so stale as the news from last week. But whichever way it turns out, I think this collection of little pieces by Zadie Smith will endure as a beautiful thing. Although it’s born out of the pandemic and the lockdown, it feels like a doorway into a new space for thought.
Smith is a wonderful essayist; she’s a natural. She writes as she thinks, and she thinks crisply and exactly, not in abstractions, but through the thick specificity of people and places, fragments of story. She doesn’t lay down the law, she argues with herself, so that the movement of her writing feels like the zigzag passage of perception inside a quick mind, not in love with its own opinions, uneasy with certainty. “Talking to yourself can be useful,” she says in her foreword. In her other essay collections – Changing My Mind and Feel Free – she’s a brilliantly assured cultural critic: we need to know what she has to say about books and art and music, and all the politics and life mixed up with those. She’s glamorously immersed in contemporary culture as well as richly intellectual and well read, her inner landscape encompassing “Kafka and Prince … Malcolm X and Aneurin Bevan”. But Intimations feels more intimate than those earlier collections. The book that came to mind sometimes as I read was Doris Lessing’s London Observed, which I loved 30 years ago. That, too, was a compendium of city-fragments, gathered up inside the same humane, keen curiosity, the same writerly close attention, the same empathetic flare of response to other lives. Continue reading...