Zadie Smith’s first novel, the lively northwest London–set “White Teeth,” exploded into the zeitgeist 25 years and half her life ago.
Ever since, she’s been contributing significantly to the culture with novels and essays, book criticism and teaching. She’s also a familiar face at the forefront of it, gracing only the most interesting fashion shows, art parties and film premieres (Bottega Veneta; the Serpentine Gallery; “Challengers”) with her singular style. Whatever “it” is, she has it.
In her new book of essays, “Dead and Alive,” Smith turns her sharp eye to movies and music festivals, museums and books, and to the online spaces where we talk about all of it.
She takes us to lunch with the novelist Hilary Mantel, to the rapper Stormzy’s kingmaking set at Glastonbury and to a Manhattan sidewalk where stoic passersby gather to help a struggling stranger in a moment of wordless community. We learn all the ways Lydia Tár was deeply Gen X, that Steve Jobs didn’t allow his kids to use the devices he designed, and, speaking for myself, a new word (oneiric: of or relating to dreams).
Smith’s fond yet clear-eyed assessment of the very human ways people make and absorb culture sits in defiant opposition to the way the algorithm has come to dominate the content we consume; the ways we think. We chatted about it — via video call, somewhat ironically, from her book-filled study in London.
You write in “Dead and Alive” about culture and life in New York City and London — Toronto isn’t to that scale but there are similarities. Have you spent much time here?
“Oh yeah, it’s a proper city. I guess Toronto in my mind is Sheila Heti and Drake — I don’t know if that’s representative of the city at all. I have been there, but ever since I had kids all book-related travel is, you know, 48 hours. Lovely, but brief.”
Having small children can really change your relationship to culture — for instance, you mention dashing through a museum with a screaming child strapped to your torso.
“Occasionally, people would be like, ‘Oh, would you like to come and sit in X museum for three weeks, or come to this retreat?’ I was like, What do you imagine is going to happen here? I’m going to leave two children and go on a writer’s retreat for four weeks in Tahiti? No, I’m not.
Now my oldest is 15, my youngest is 12. This was the first summer when the last day of school came and they just left the house and I didn’t see them. And it was a real shock, because it’s been 15 years of assuming that nothing will get written between June 28 and September 2. I suddenly had all this free time and to be honest, it was weird. Some of it was blissful, like, ‘Oh my God, I could just go to the park and read a book.’ But if you’re so used to being under time constraints, it’s hard to get used to.”
In this book’s introduction, you write that people can fear essays will be too academic or exclusionary but here “the door is open” to all. Why is that important to you?
“When I was young, I was a bit like, ‘Why, when I give a reading, is it like an 85-year-old Pakistani lady, a 25-year-old white boy and three Black girls, but if I go to X’s reading, it’s just loads of hot-looking hipsters. Like, what’s wrong with me?’ Now I really treasure it. Whenever I give a reading, I can’t even guess who’s going to come up to the table. When I’m writing, that’s always in my mind — I don’t know who’s going to be picking up this book. So I need to make some space for them.
My own life is also full of different types of people. I’m about to turn 50 and I’ve been hemming and hawing about whether to have a party. On the one hand it’s going be these old people who want to sit down and talk about books; on the other hand it’s people who want to dance, and people who want to get high. I’m like, how are all these people going to be in a room together? It’s anxiety-making like a wedding, but weddings are often fun — just let your uncle dance with that person you met in college, it’s fine. I guess the book is an attempt to create that kind of atmosphere.”
It sounds like the best kind of party. Do you hear from your readers a lot?
“Because I’m not online in that way, the people who do reach me have made some kind of effort. They’ve got my email somehow, or written a letter to my publisher, and so I get the normal human amount of response that writers got throughout human history until about 2008, when suddenly it became normal to hear from like a million people. So I get a cross-section of opinions about whatever it was I did. There’s going to be some people who hated it, some liked it, some were offended. Got it, then I can just move on.”
In the chapter “Black Manhattan,” you write that James Weldon Johnson’s book about Harlem in the roaring ’20s was more or less out of date as soon as the ink was dry. Your book is also very of the moment — does that present challenges?
“I think of my work like a slow food movement. You can go to McDonald’s or you could wait a really long time for me to make this very slow steak. You’ll pick up this book at some point and you’ll have a relationship with it, and in fact the more time that passes, sometimes, the better. In the heat of discourse, you’re not really reading. You’ve already pre-responded.”
Do you tend to read voraciously and quickly, or take your time?
“There’s a new book, ‘Heart the Lover’ by Lily King, it’s a weepie. It’s fantastic and I read it like, boom, right to the end, and then I gave it to my daughter — we were on a plane. She’s not normally a big reader and she read it, boom. Wept on the plane. It’s wonderful when that happens. Very rare. Normally I’m thinking about how the book is written and what I can steal. But it’s lovely when it genuinely takes you away.”
Do you have a TBR pile of books “to be read” that you haven’t gotten to?
“I know I shouldn’t complain but I actually feel oppressed by it. I’m not a book reviewer anymore but I still get sent dozens of books every week. I carry six or seven in my bag and I’m reading three or four at the same time. There’s not time enough in life. I’ve never read Proust; that’s always being put off for another day. But I can’t really function without a book in hand. I could go for a year without writing a word but I don’t think there’s a day since I was a kid that I haven’t read something. It’s a compulsion. The writing comes out of the reading. It’s like a by-product.”
Do you use culture as escapism, like the Australian, British and American soaps you talk about watching as a kid in up to nine hours of TV a day?
“Yeah, I mean my life was built on escapism. I had a lot to escape from; my family home was no picnic so I was always trying to be somewhere else mentally. It’s just a question of who’s on the other side of the screen; who do you want to be distracted by. When winter comes, I’m like, how many ‘Love is Blind’s am I going to watch? On Netflix, you don’t have to press ‘next episode,’ it just happens. So at the moment, I’m watching a short 1940s movie every night because I love those movies. And I just feel better.”
You mentioned Las Culturistas, Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers’ podcast, which I agree is delightful.
“They’ve got me through so much, yeah. I love those guys, how much they love the best of the internet, the joy of the internet. They’re so smart and so funny. And also, I’m just amazed at the total takeover by NYU students of the entire culture. That was not on my bingo card when I was teaching there. These Tisch kids would not write essays for me, they would never turn up, and it turns out they were about to dominate the world of stage and screen and music and everything else. I now understand that they were all super busy with much more interesting things than writing essays for creative writing modules, god bless them.”
You wrote that you keep the radio on much of the day. Since you’re not very online, is that how you “swim in the cultural waters”?
“I understand from talking to literally everyone, the way you guys get news is it’s on, like, 50 different mediums and it’s in your pocket and you doom scroll, all the time. Whereas the way I get news is from listening to the [BBC] World Service, which has reporters from all over the world reporting on the ground. When I’m in conversation with people about what’s going on, I don’t find that I am uninformed. Quite often, to be honest, I feel like I’m better informed. It’s very heavy sometimes but I don’t feel yanked and triggered like a puppet. I am doing the laundry, listening to a Sudanese or Palestinian journalist speaking of their experience. I listen to them, I comprehend it and I go back to my day.”
Often, doom-scrolling feeds you the tiniest snippet or image of something horrifying, without any context.
“When I see that over people’s shoulders on the bus I’m genuinely horrified, and then it will go from a dead child to, like, a cake. Seeing that makes me feel crazy, then multiplying that and realizing that, oh, everybody [is experiencing this] just explains so much.”
I love that you only have WhatsApp on your desktop. That one really pings day and night.
“I can’t imagine what it would be like to have that in your back pocket. If I want to fritter my day away and not get any writing done, I open WhatsApp on my computer. What I normally do is work all day and just open it in the evening, deal with what there is to deal with and move on. But if it’s on, I’ll just be chatting to 100 different groups of people I haven’t seen in a really long time.”
Am I correct to assume you don’t use Chat GPT?
“I just can’t think of anything that I would want it to do. I hear people in the coffee shop saying, ‘I didn’t know what to do this week, so I asked Chat GPT’ — like, I literally asked the machine what I should do with my life. I’m like, OK, that’s an interesting thing to do.
I saw a comedy sketch video one of the AI companies put out, with a fake actress in it. The jokes are well-written but your eye kind of slides off it. You are in no way compelled. Then I switched it off and I opened a window where Chappell Roan was singing, and the difference was so monumental. Maybe AI will get better, but it was something more than technical. It was like a human essence that is not conveyed in those videos.
You know, I’m just on the side of humans, so I have to, in all things, be the enemy of the machine.”
“Because when it started, it wasn’t a manifesto. I just never got it. And then I continued not to have it. And then years passed, and I still didn’t have it! I made the mistake of mentioning it, and then people would ask me about it all the time. It is expressed so wrong-headedly, as if because it feels like an addiction, then not doing it is kind of holier than thou. But that suggests people are responsible for their relationships with these phones and I genuinely do not believe they are. I think this is structural and it’s about money and the people responsible for it are hiding in plain sight and should be prosecuted. So to me it’s not an individual ethical question. I just knew that given how much I need approval and applause and other people, it would kill me.”
