BOOK REVIEW - Nov. 19, 2017

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“Swing Time”

By Zadie Smith

Penguin, 453 pp., $17

 

By Michael Upchurch

 

Coming of age is a nebulous process. You’re working with material that you don’t quite understand – your emerging self – and deciphering how it does or doesn’t mesh with the world around you.

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Parents, schoolteachers and physical surroundings figure in the equation. But picking up on cultural signals is a vital part of it, too. If you’re a bright inquisitive child, your tastes in music, movies, books, fashion and art are something you explore on your own. Adults don’t get it. Adults are strangely oblivious to the siren songs that can seduce you. And when you meet a peer who shares your tastes, it can blow parental and school authority out of the picture.

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Zadie Smith’s extraordinarily fine and funny fifth novel, “Swing Time,” follows the story of two bi-racial girls growing up in northwest London, starting in the early 1980s. It’s filled with every possible pleasure that fiction can offer: generational conflict, marital breakdown, professional rivalries, overseas adventure, celebrity delusions, charged racial politics, belated understandings, sex, betrayal and ironic miscalculation. It pulses with so much life that you may feel its experiences are your own.

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But the best thing about it is Smith’s focus on the role that cultural signals play in her young characters’ lives.

They aren’t necessarily the signals you would expect from a 1980s childhood (Smith was born in 1975). True, Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince rate a mention. But so do Fred Astaire, the Nicholas Brothers and a lesser-known African-American dancer, Jeni LeGon, who steals a scene in a 1937 musical that fascinates Smith’s nameless narrator and her best friend Tracey.

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Smith, of course, burst on the literary scene in 2000 with “White Teeth,” a feisty cornucopia of a novel about the entangled history of a Jamaican-British family and Muslim Bengali family in northwest London from the 1940s through the 1990s. Smith’s voice was so dazzling that it blinded enthusiastic readers to flaws in the book that Smith herself was quick to point out.

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“This kind of precocity in so young a writer,” she quipped shortly after her splashy debut, “has one half of the audience standing to applaud and the other half wishing, as with child performers of the past (Shirley Temple, Bonnie Langford et al.), she would just stay still and shut up. ‘White Teeth’ is the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing 10-year-old.”

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Rereading “White Teeth” recently, it struck me that Smith had a point. While the book starts out with an uproarious bang and keeps up its antic energy for several hundred pages, it gets overly cluttered with writing stunts and set pieces toward the end. “Swing Time,” by contrast, covers similar ground – the experience of growing up in multi-ethnic London – with quieter ingenuity.

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And you still get the tap-dancing.

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Obsessions with dance and pop music – both girls take a dance class together – propel the novel. (“The passions in this book,” Smith has said, “are definitely autobiographical.”) Smith’s narrator is the ringleader when it comes to investigating these old Hollywood musicals.

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“Ali Baba Goes to Town is a strange film,” she says of that 1937 musical. “It’s a variation on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in which Eddie Cantor plays Al Babson, an everyday schmuck who finds himself working as an extra on an Arabian Nights-type picture, out in Hollywood. On set he falls asleep and dreams he’s back in ninth-century Arabia.”

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The movie’s key production number is described with wry zest: “The Arabs are Hollywood Arabs, white, in Aladdin costumes. The Africans are black Americans dressed up—loincloths and feathers, outlandish head-dresses—and they play primitive musical instruments, in a parody of their future Cotton Club incarnations: trombones made of actual bone, clarinets formed from hollowed-out sticks, that sort of thing.”

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In this dream sequence Cantor, in black-face, serves as bandleader signaling performers on when to make an entrance or leave the stage: “He told them that swing was here to stay, that there was no avoiding it, and so they must choose a partner—and dance. Then Cantor blew his whistle and the wonderful thing happened. It was a girl—a girl arrived. I made Tracey sit as close to the screen as she could, I didn’t want there to be any doubt about it. I looked across: I saw her lips part in surprise, as mine had done the first time I watched it, and then I knew that she could see what I saw.”

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The dancer, LeGon, is a dead-ringer for Tracey, and her performance is like a validating message-in-a-bottle that has washed up on these youngsters’ shores.

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“Her arms,” we’re told, “wheel-barrowed as she moved, her legs flew back and forth, she was a hoofer, not an obsessed technician. And she was funny: walking on her toes or freeze-framing for a second in an absurd comic attitude, on one leg, arms in the air, like the hood ornament on an expensive car. Dressed like the rest—grass skirt, feathers—but nothing could diminish her."

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Both girls are captivated by this minor Hollywood figure, whom they learn more about as the book proceeds. But only Tracey takes an actual stab at a dance career.

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If LeGon is one muse-like presence in the novel, a contemporary pop star named Aimee – who has quite a bit in common with Madonna, but isn’t Madonna – is the other. Originally from a small town in Australia, she has left the island continent far behind by the time Smith’s narrator lucks into a job as her personal assistant.

“Her first single came out the week of my tenth birthday,” Smith’s narrator recalls. “She was twenty-two at the time. By the end of that same year, she once told me, she could no longer walk down the street, not in Melbourne, Paris, New York, London, Tokyo.”

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The two girls’ families naturally play a big role in their tale as well. The narrator is the luckier of the two. She has a loving, dope-smoking, happily domestic white father who works for the post office, does most of the cooking and cleaning at home, and is happy with the way things are. Her mother, on the other hand, is an ambitious black woman of Jamaican background who, much to her family’s mystification, is trying to better herself with courses at Britain’s Open University. (“She was studying Sociology & Politics. We didn’t know why.”)

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Tracey, by contrast, lives in “a high-rise estate of poor reputation” and is far less fortunate in the parental department. Her mother, “white, obese, afflicted with acne,” is stuck at the bottom of the social ladder. Her daughter is “her only joy,” but motherly devotion doesn’t translate into many advantages for Tracey, from what her best friend can tell.

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Though her dad is out of the picture, Tracey is “steadfast and loyal to his memory, far more likely to defend her absent father than I was to speak kindly of my wholly attentive one,” the narrator says. “Tracey has even concocted an excuse for his neglect. “Her father had not abandoned her, no, not at all, he was only very busy because he was one of Michael Jackson’s backing dancers.”

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The narrator, in retrospect, has trouble deciding how much credence she gave this bit of information as a girl. “It was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these."  

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“Double-faced facts” only multiply as the two girls move past their teens and enter their twenties (the novel’s action wraps up in 2008). Tracey’s father has done prison time and his reappearances in his daughter’s life are something to be feared as much as savored. The question of which girl is doing better in the world, either personally or professionally, grows ever more elusive as the novel proceeds. Awkward reunions give way to years-long estrangements. Painful mutual revelations (and possible fabrications) can’t erase the sister-deep relationship between them.

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Smith explores the complications of this friendship from multiple points in time. Indeed, the book’s title – along with alluding to the classic Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film that the girls watch repeatedly – is a verbal command, setting the narrative pendulum in motion between past, present and points in-between. (In her acknowledgments, Smith thanks her husband, writer Nick Laird, for seeing “what had to be done with time, just in time.”)

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The title also manifests itself in the way these two 1980s kids can manipulate time as they slip videotapes into their VHS players. “We were the first generation to have, in our own homes, the means to re- and forward-wind reality: even very small children could press their fingers against those clunky buttons and see what-has-been become what-is or what-will-be.”

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In the scene where the two girls study that production number from “Ali Baba Goes to Town,” Smith expands the swathes of time farther. The song Cantor sings becomes a springboard across the centuries as he delivers “a verse that seemed to swing time itself, flashing far ahead, to a moment when these Africans would no longer be as they were presently, a time a thousand years in the future when they would set the tempo the world wants to dance to, in a place called Harlem.”

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However Hollywood-ized and camp this scene is in its excesses, it still exerts a powerful call, especially to Tracey, who winds up appearing in “Guys and Dolls” in London’s West End and touring on Britain’s provincial theater circuit. But she never emerges from the chorus, and her anger at the world grows more caustic with every year that passes.

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Meanwhile Smith’s narrator, pulled into Aimee’s glamorous life, gets a crash-course on how easy it is to detach yourself from reality’s constraints when you’re continually flying high, whether on a private aircraft (“If we didn’t like winter we flew toward summer”) or under the influence of drink or drugs. The only things she remains sure of are the music and films that mean so much to her. Without them, you get the feeling, she would have nothing at all to anchor her.

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Smith’s narrator deep uncertainty about herself (without Tracey as her foil, she is, she says, “a body without a distinct outline”) contributes centrally to the book’s immediacy and suspense. In a short prologue at the outset of the novel, she alerts us that she’s well aware of why her life is crashing down around her: “A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.”

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“Swing Time,” in a way, can be read as a contest by the three key women in her life – her mother, Tracey and Aimee – to fill the void where that shadow is. While drawn to their examples, she can’t quite bring herself to succumb to any of them.

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“My mother was a feminist,” she says, plainly inferring that for her “feminist” is a loaded term. “She wore her hair in a half-inch Afro, her skull was perfectly shaped, she never wore make-up and dressed us both as plainly as possible. Hair is not essential when you look like Nefertiti.”

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Her belated admiration for the accomplishments of her mother, whose leftist passions lead to her winning a seat in Parliament, are accompanied by lingering childhood bewilderment and resentment. (“What do we want from our mothers when we are children?” she asks. The answer is “complete submission” – something her mother was never prepared to give her.)

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Her best friend is just as overpowering a character. In one episode, Tracey asks her friend “sharply” what she’d like to do and she’s flummoxed by the question. “I had no idea,” she confesses. “Never before had I been canvassed for ideas of what to do, she was the one with all the ideas.”

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In the later age of social media, Tracey’s ideas evolve into an embrace of Internet conspiracy theories that are “striking in their detail and perverse erudition, linking many diverse historical periods and political ideas and facts, combining them all into a sort of theory of everything, which even in its comic wrongness required a certain depth of study and a persistent attention.”

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The narrator – skeptically theory-free herself – is nonetheless acute in her understanding of what triggers Tracey’s agitated postings online: “Wasn’t it all a way of explaining power, in the end? The power that certainly exists in the world? Which few hold and most never get near? A power my old friend must have felt, at that point in her life, she utterly lacked?”

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If that sounds condescending, one reason may be that the narrator at this point in the book is seeing power in action, thanks to her job as a personal assistant to Aimee, the most extravagant creation in the novel. Smith is brilliant in the way she makes the pop star simultaneously earthbound and disconnected from all the usual constraints of reality, taking on lovers like new wardrobe items and dropping in on a West African country (the town names—Banjul, Serrekunda, Barra — indicate it’s The Gambia) to found a girls’ school in a remote, impoverished village.

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This isn’t, Aimee’s young assistant persuades herself, strictly an ego trip.

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“Aimee herself had no abstract interest in power. She was motivated by something else: impatience. To Aimee poverty was one of the world’s sloppy errors, one among many, which might be easily corrected if only people would bring to the problem the focus she brought to everything.”

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Smith’s narrator is initially euphoric about being in Africa. But joy soon gives way to doubts. The girls-school project is strewn with pitfalls. The “friendships” between First World do-gooders and Third World beneficiaries prove tricky. Even the local dance rituals grow tarnished in the narrator’s mind after Aimee appropriates them for her stage show.

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The whole African adventure culminates in scandal and unwanted publicity for both Aimee and her assistant. Relations between them are additionally muddied by the question of whether Smith’s narrator is really a friend and confidante of Aimee or simply her employee.

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Smith’s orchestration of this bumpy ride is a thing of plot-spinning wizardry, as she manages to weave her narrator’s decades-long anxieties about her mother and Tracey into her Aimee-related crises. Secondary narrative threads, one of them to do with the narrator’s father’s secrets (he has a second family), bring other bombshells her way. But it’s the women who dominate. And it’s hard to say which of them, if any, holds the higher moral ground.

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That ambiguity, of course, is intentional. It’s how Smith – too attentive to her characters’ wayward impulses to pass easy judgment on them – sees the world. Her authorial voice is sane, illuminating and wise throughout, even when her narrator is suffering from glaring blind spots.

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On a larger scale, the novel serves as a low-key history on how the colonies came home to Britain over the past 200 years.

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Some episodes are drawn from the history books, as is the case with Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a “quick and alert” West African girl kidnapped by the King of Dahomey who later became a god-daughter to Queen Victoria. Others draw on living memory, including an aging West End actor’s fond memories of 1950s Soho when “there was no black, there was no white. Nothing so banal.”

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One of the actor’s friends was “Paul” who, with his boyfriend, shared a flat in the late 1950s with painter Francis Bacon. Paul later played the black sailor in the groundbreaking 1961 film “A Taste of Honey,” and a little digging reveals this was Ghana-born Paul Danquah, of mixed race himself.

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The film, which touches on single motherhood, racial issues and homosexuality as if they were no big deal, is a landmark in the history of multicultural Britain – and you get the feeling there are few such landmarks that elude Smith’s eye.

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In the last stretch of the book, after the narrator’s relationships with Aimee, her mother and Tracey have all hit crisis point, she finds herself in Paris where she cottons onto the emancipatory promise that the city has made to ethnic African exiles before her: “I thought of all the singers and dancers and trumpet players and sculptors and scribblers who had claimed to feel like people, finally, here, in Paris, no longer shadows but people in their own right … and I wondered how these people were able to tell, so precisely, the moment that they began to feel like a person.”

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Once again cultural touchstones offer her a lifeline.

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She has made bad mistakes. She has burned some bridges behind her. But by a convoluted route, she finds her way home – and even strays, in the final paragraph, across the most inviting, if informal, of dances as she seeks to clear things up yet again with Tracey.

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And that, in its modest way, may be all that she needs.