Review: 'Swing Time'

Swing Time
By Zadie Smith
Literary Fiction
November 2016
Penguin Press
ISBN: 978-1594203985

Fiction is useful as a reminder of the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day and as a way of seeing and hearing the voices, the multitudes of this world. It is a way to help us refine our definition of what matters.

Searching for something to matter may be what drives the nameless narrator of Zadie Smith's Swing Time, a novel just named to this year's Man Booker longlist. She is a girl who grew up in '80s London, loves old musicals and dance, and is intimidated by three forceful women in her life. Her mother is a fierce warrior for social justice, spending more time in books and speeches than raising her daughter. Her father, a postman, handles the domestic tasks.

The closest thing she has to a friend is another girl she meets in a community dance class. Tracey is a natural dancer. Her home life is a mess, living with her white mother and making up stories about her black father, who is rarely around. Tracy also is a natural storyteller and targets the men who mean something to our narrator, sometimes out of maliciousness, sometimes out of pettiness. After one such act, the narrator loses contact with Tracey for years.

After floating through university, the narrator is hired by global pop star Aimee, who seems a lot like Madonna, as a personal assistant. With no life of her own, the narrator winds up in Africa when Aimee decides to open a school for girls there. The people that the narrator forms attachments with there do not provide any sense of homegoing, and she does not attempt to find any familial roots. Even going to the tourist trap that a former slave prison has become does not provide an epiphany. But in trying to do what she considers a just action, she finds herself cast out.

The narrator feels vague and rootless throughout the novel. That's often how she looks at life as well, not noticing the obvious until much later. The title, "Swing Time", is taken from the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical. It's a film she adored growing up but did not realize until years later that one musical number, a number she thought she had memorized, is done in blackface. As a person of color, it seems obvious that she would notice this her entire life.

The earlier lack of noticing and the eventual noticing are the way the narrator has lived her life.

At the novel's conclusion, there is a sense that now the narrator has lost important people and discovered an essential aspect of another, that she may have finally noticed something that she can use in her own life and sense of self. It is oblique, but that's the way Smith tells her stories.

Swing Time feels like two distinct novels. There is the coming-of-age story with Tracey and their parents, with instances of Tracey's casual cruelty detailed with precision. There is an intimacy in this story within the overall book, and a sense that because things happened during childhood and early youth, those things matter deeply.

The other story, of the narrator's life with Aimee and the extended Africa storyline, is more a story that takes on global ideas rather than personal ones. The descriptions of the cruelty that comes from a celebrity taking up a cause and fundamentally changing a community are well-drawn with the author showing the reader, rather than telling.

The strongest tie between the two stories is the narrator's realization toward the beginnning of the book that she "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." After the flashbacks that make up the book, a colleague tells the narrator that being a fatalist "means something simple, like to say the future is already there, waiting for you. Why not wait, see what it brings?"

Perhaps the narrator has learned what she said earlier on: "The story was the price you paid for the rhythm." Perhaps she is ready to accept the rhythm and the price from here on out.

©2017 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Review and reprinted by permission

Review: 'The Past'

The Past
By Tessa Hadley
Literary fiction
January 2016
HarperCollins
ISBN: 978-0062270412

Some books are just meant to live in and enjoy. Such is Tessa Hadley's The Past.

Four siblings arrive at various stopping places in their own lives to spend the annual three-week summer holiday in their late grandparents' country house. It was once the rectory. Just like the varying perspectives of the now middle-aged children, the connotations can be either bucolic fantasy retreat or the height of dreariness. Still, we are British and we will make the best of it.

Harriet, the eldest, seems to live in her own universe without letting real life wear her down. Alice arrives determined that everyone will have a jolly time, including Kasim. He's the 20-year-old son of her former lover who has been talked into coming down to the country. Once he arrives, the lack of cell phone coverage is about the end of the world. That is, until Alice and Harriet's brother Roland arrives. Along for the ride are his intimidating, beautiful third wife and, more importantly to Kasim, 16-year-old Molly. Fran is the final sibling, bringing her younger children but unaccompanied by her husband.

In other hands, this would be the set-up for farce or histronics. But Hadley has an assured, subtle hand in guiding her characters to arrive at realizations about themselves and those they love most. This is Alice Munro territory in the English countryside.

For example, the way two of the sisters return to the rectory this summer recreates that feeling of returning somewhere so well known that it is a surprise to be back in the reality of what is remembered:

Fran unlocked the front door and the sisters stood hesitating on the brink of the interior for a moment, preparing themselves, recognising what they had forgotten while they were away from it -- the under-earth smell of imprisoned air, something plaintive in the thin light of the hall with its grey and white tiled floor and thin old rugs faded to red-mud colour. There was always a moment of adjustment as the shabby, needy actuality of the place settled over their too-hopeful idea of it.

Or this:

... the past of the place enfolded them as soon as they arrived, they fell back inside its patterns and repetitions, absorbed into what had been done there before.

This year, that will be true but not completely, as other things do happen.

Fran's children make a grotesque discovery in an abandoned cottage that fascinates them. As their fascination continues, the realization of what they are doing is something they wrestle with. Kasim would love to make discoveries about Molly. Roland's Argentinian wife confides in a sister who thinks she is poised to make a discovery about herself. Discoveries about family letters are the source of friction and the siblings are unsure if it makes sense to sell the property, if they should sell the property or, for one, if they want the property sold because the money would come in awfully handy.

The climax of the story and its resolutions feel real and right. Being able to enjoy a novel and say, "Oh yes, that's as it should be" was my reading experience here. There was even a To the Lighthouse moment that the tone of the work seemed to call for; to see it occur brought a small sigh of reading happiness.



©2016 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Review and reprinted by permission

Review: 'Us'

Us
By David Nicholls
Literary fiction
October 2014
Harper
ISBN: 978-0062365583

Us by David Nicholls chronicles, with extensive flashbacks, a family that may or may not be about to fall apart. After decades of marriage, the artistic wife of biochemist Douglas Peterson tells him one morning that she isn't sure she wants to be married any longer. He adores Connie and, in flashbacks from the evening they meet at his sister's flat and beyond, it's easy to see why. She loves life, she is interested in things, in experiences. Connie isn't so much a free spirit, except in contrast to the earnest, clueless soul that Dougie presents himself as, as she is vibrant.

When Connie has announced her decision, they have already planned an old-fashioned Grand Tour of the continent, taking their son as the last family hurrah before he goes to university.

It is, of course, no fun at all. The three are tetchy around each other, the madcap escapades get more out of hand.

Doug, the novel's narrator, goes on and on about things but as Connie tells him, "Douglas, you have an incredible capacity for missing the point."

He loves her perspective even while knowing it's not how he sees the world: "I didn't hate art, not by any means, but I did hate knowing nothing about it." This extends beyond paintings, of course, as in this exchange between the couple:

"I've got nothing against dreams as long as they're attainable."
"But if they're attainable then they're not dreams!"
"And that's why it's a waste of time!"

Unlike the above exchange, however, Connie doesn't always take the opposite stance from Doug. Sometimes she's one of the grown-ups in the room now too. There are moments when Connie has become more like Doug than he has become like her. Their son Albie is early on picked up by an older woman who is busking her way through Europe, playing the accordion to earn money when not scarfing down huge amounts of food at hotel buffets. Connie is as offended as Doug is when this woman, Cat, puts food in her pockets after coming down to breakfast with them. She backs up Doug when he tells Cat the Moocher to put back some of the little jars she's swiping.

So, does this mean married couples grow more alike? Or people become more conservative and not as much fun as they grow older? Or does this mean nothing of the kind and rude is rude, after all? Us is the kind of novel that lets a reader wonder about these things even as the story proceeds.

Douglas is not always easy to understand, even if he understands himself. In one flashback, he relates how his parents were even worse than Doug is about being no fun at all. And when he took Connie home to meet them, there was a political disagreement. Doug stood with Connie. But now, when this hapless, apologetic family man is in the middle of a restaurant row involving his smart remark-making son, the busker accordionist who has picked him up, his wife and some wealthy arms dealers with glossy brochures spread across the breakfast table, Doug does the worst thing possible. He apologizes for his son.

As Connie tells him: "...in a fight you side with the people you love".

Immediately afterward, Doug reminisces:

I'm aware that it sounds perverse, but what I hoped for at that time was some accident, some near disaster, so that I could be as heroic as the occasion demanded, and show the strength of my devotion.

Yes that is perverse because real life demands as much heroism and devotion and steadfastness as we can give, and then some. We don't need near disasters. We need to pay attention to the here and now. Douglas, was Connie ever right.

The turning point in the novel shows that Doug may have realized he has his opportunity to pull off some heroic deed. Or at least, what passes as one for someone like him who plans holidays by museum itineraries and is always at the airport a good two hours early. There is a chance that Douglas may redeem himself whether or not he and his son, and he and his wife, reconcile. He realizes:

... perhaps grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost.

Indeed, Douglas, indeed. This character has just demonstrated that you never know when you are going to have a new realization about something you think you know very well indeed -- yourself.

The second half of the novel chronicles Doug's mission, with its ups and downs. It also continues his ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory whenever he says something wrong, which he still does. And the novel continues with the ability of this middle-aged man who has been alienating himself from his wife and son to become involved in outrageously ridiculous scenarios as he treks through Europe.

And yet, and yet, whenever the plot reaches a point that is OTT and a reader would not be faulted for giving up on it, go ahead and read another page. Keep going as the flashbacks shed light on how our narrator got himself into this pickle and how he remains someone who has not given up on himself, his wife, his son or on hope itself.

That there also is an unexpected development just when things are at their lowest point and Doug not only turns a former antagonist into an ally, because of honesty, changed one of the tropes of the novel. Before, whenever another party became involved with the Petersons, the outside catalyst became something that broke the pattern of the triangle of the three characters. The outside character didn't add another layer, that character instead caused a fracture.

This original structure and the changes made to it play a significant role in the way the plot plays itself out.

In between the flashbacks and the current story, Nicholls also gives Doug the opportunity for a passionate speech about modern technology, capitalism and the resulting widening of the gap between the rich and the poor. Plus all the other things that have been going wrong in the world.

Nicholls also has insightful commentary about how children become like their parents in some ways and how children strive to become their own people, whether it's Douglas and his son or Douglas and his father.

Although the novel continues on long after the story itself is finished -- including an odd section where the plot is retold from the vantage of Connie being the protagonist and Albie being the protagonist -- Us is one of those novels about a journey in which the journey of reading it was worthwhile.

©2014 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission