![]() “Talking to yourself can be useful,” she says in her foreword. 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. 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. Smith is a wonderful essayist she’s a natural. ![]() Although it’s born out of the pandemic and the lockdown, it feels like a doorway into a new space for thought. But whichever way it turns out, I think this collection of little pieces by Zadie Smith will endure as a beautiful thing. 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. T here are probably going to be a lot of lockdown books. ![]()
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