Zadie Smith feels the entertainment media's teeth
A flurry of coverage of novelist Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth, has been brought on by its impending UK television adaptation and her forthcoming second novel, The Autograph Man.
The Independent sympathizes with the British (or is it universal?) tendency to build them up, then tear them down. The BBC reports that she will be fleeing the intense UK publicity for the relative calm of graduate work at Harvard. The Guardian quizzes her on her feelings about the TV version of her work and presents a loafer's guide for viewers. Fortunately, the Guardian also gives us an excerpt from The Autograph Man.
Says the Independent about her new novel:
What remains the same is Smith's fascination with minority cultures, in the latest novel Jews. Black identification with the experience of Jewish life is hardly new: from the slaves in America singing spirituals about life in Egypt under the pharaohs to the post-war civil rights movements in the American South that drew on Jewish precedents... Her principal character, the autograph man himself, is writing a book cataloguing which characteristics and people are Jewish and which are goyish [gentile]; unsurprisingly the warm, humanly enhancing characteristics are Jewish, the distant, cool ones are goyish...There is another Lenny Bruce riff that comes to mind when thinking of Smith's own career thoughts: first to be a tap-shoe dancer, then a jazz singer and finally a popular writer. Bruce, discussing the survival strategies of minorities, instances entertainment as a traditional escape from enslavement and its modern form, pigeon-holing. This, he posits, is the real impulse behind black singing ("Hey slave, put that pick down and come over here and sing that song again") and Jewish charm ("Hey Jew, stop building that pyramid and come over here and be charming"). Listen to Smith herself comment on her decision to give up her ambition to be a dancer: "Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up timestep with shuffle."
It's hard to imagine Zadie's kind of candor about race and culture making it to American television, however satirically packaged. Maybe to the big screen, provided it's branded as being from a known "irreverent" director. I look forward to renting White Teeth in 2004 or so.
Meanwhile with all the interest the media have given to Zadie Smith's changing hairstyles, she has passed on the favor with the essay "On the Road: American Writers and Their Hair". (Thanks to LinkMachineGo.)