British writer Zadie Smith burst onto the literary scene in 2000 with the release of her enthralling novel White Teeth, which she completed in her last year at Cambridge University. Since then, the author has written numerous essays, nonfiction pieces, and four more novels — including The Autograph Man, NW, and On Beauty — and won a host of literary awards. On November 29, Smith will appear in conversation with Pico Iyer as part of UCSB’s Arts & Lectures Speaking with Pico series. Smith spoke recently with the Santa Barbara Independent about her latest book, 2016’s Swing Time.
One of the central characters in Swing Time finds herself caught unawares by adolescence and has a tough time finding her place and her tribe. Did you have a similar experience? To be honest, I was very confounded by puberty. I just wasn’t on board with the whole thing. I wasn’t into the goth scene as the girls in Swing Time are. I had a couple of close girlfriends, but most of the time I was reading and inside my own head. I think I read all of Shakespeare by the time I was 15, 16. I was really just a reader. I didn’t have any natural place to be.
The narrator of Swing Time is never identified by name. Why is that? In a way, I wanted to work against the contemporary grain, as Kafka often did when he identified characters by a single letter. The narrator in Swing Time is someone, for sure, but she is also a kind of no one.