Good Reads / Community Library Notes
Swing Time - Zadie Smith
Review by Priscilla Comen
Swing Time - Zadie Smith
Review by Priscilla Comen
“Swing Time” by Zadie Smith, a graduate of Cambridge University in the UK, is about two young brown girls, Tracey and an unnamed narrator. Their mothers are very different from each other as is their home life. Tracey has no father, the narrator’s father does everything for her: makes her breakfast, takes her to ballet lessons, conferences with her teachers. Both girls love dance and practice their steps at Tracey’s house when no one is home. They watch Fred Astaire movies and copy the routines.
The narrator goes to work for a famous singer, Aimee. They travel around the country with Granger, Aimee’s bodyguard. They visit galleries and laugh at the paintings. They swim in the freezing cold lady’s pool. Aimee and the narrator go out at one a.m. to the bars and sing to the crowds with the piano player. The narrator’s mother is elected to Parliament, and at lunch, tells her daughter she does everything for Aimee, and nothing for herself, ie, finding a suitable man. Tracey, the narrator’s friend, is upset because the narrator’s mother does nothing to help the poor people of her jurisdiction. When the narrator goes to Africa with Aimee, she is protected from reality; she’s not allowed to cook, to hold babies, or to sit on a chair, or eat with knife and fork. She wants to see the old slave fort. Aimee’s base of operations becomes a big old house near Senegal, and they immediately put in electricity. A generator is attached to the village huts. Aimee is photographed everywhere in the villages, as they tour the schools followed by running, adoring children. They see the torn and dirty school books, the filthy outhouses, and the mismatched scarves on the girls. Where are the boys? Author Smith causes the reader to have empathy for the villagers of West Africa. She makes this novel a treatise on how to fix a broken country. On a trip there four months later, the narrator finds pesticides in the groundwater wells, pot holes in the roads, and a government absent from the villages. Will Aimee be able to re-make the girls into able women in time? This novel received mixed reviews, some called it a “big social novel," others (The New York Times) criticized the “unsympathetic narrator” who “just floated.” See what you think. It’s on the new fiction shelf of your community library |