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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/28/intimations-review-zadie-smiths-life-under-lockdown The novelist’s essays on living through coronavirus are at their best when pondering the day-to-day In Zadie Smith’s previous book, the experimental story collection Grand Union, the most interesting items also happened to be the least unconventional. That’s rarely the case in her new book, Intimations, a shape-shifting series of essays reflecting on life in a time of Covid-19, in which she left New York for lockdown in London, writing in “those scraps of time the year… has allowed”. Meditations on what the pandemic has done for creativity or political commentary on how the US could look to postwar Britain under Clement Attlee feel less essential than more rhetorically adventurous items; there’s a strangely moving list of personal influences (family, Muhammad Ali, “contingency”) that constitutes a kind of kaleidoscopic selfie and an essay that riffs on coronavirus as a metaphor for racism, comparing – in passing – Dominic Cummings’s eyes to those of Derek Chauvin as he knelt on George Floyd.
The pieces vary in tone. What one calls the moment “just before the global shit hit the fan”, another calls “a few days before the global humbling began”. Smith’s loftier mode (“America has rarely been philosophically inclined to consider existence as a whole”) tends to feel less convincing, not least when, discussing a writer’s need for
control, she muses on her attraction to tulips prior to “this strange and overwhelming season of death”. She’s more engaging in the glimpses of day-to-day life under the new normal: pressing a lift button through her sleeve in the early days of the pandemic or feeling self-conscious talking to her mum on Zoom. One piece begins by describing her ATM dash while packing up to take her family to a friend’s empty cottage upstate en route to London before the flights are grounded. She’s appealingly candid: when a neighbour tells her: “We’ll get through this, all of us, together”, she whispers: “‘Yes, we will’, hardly audible, even to myself” while walking on, the truth hanging in the air that she’s about to skip town. Smith probes the obligation she feels to point out that she's 'lucky compared to so many others, but not suffering' Continue reading...
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