Decoded

Introduction

Zadie Smith: Critical Essays (2008) was a groundbreaking exploration of the novels White Teeth (2000), The Autograph Man (2002), On Beauty (2005), and the short story “Hanwell in Hell” (2005). At the time of its publication, it made an important contribution to an emerging body of scholarship on Zadie Smith’s fiction. In 2013, Phillip Tew published Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond, an indepth edited collection of essays examining Smith’s writing from 2000 to 2012. Almost a decade later, Smith has authored a new novel, a book of short stories, a novella, and two collections of essays, enough fiction and non-fiction to warrant this new study. The five articles in Decoded: New Essays on Zadie Smith, focus on Smith’s most current literary output, and examine her evolution from an optimistic champion of multiculturalism to a subdued austere realist. Once the face and voice of multiculturalism, Smith has morphed into a transnational writer who has broadened her social critique from the local to the global arena.

It’s been twenty years since Smith published White Teeth, the novel that made her the darling of the literary establishment. White Teeth is by far her most successful novel. White Teeth sold more than 42,000 copies in its first print run and in 2002 it was adapted into a television mini-series. Subsequent novels also received critical acclaim. On Beauty (2005) was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Swing Time (2016) was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and the collection of literary criticism, Feel Free (2018) was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award. Undoubtedly, Smith has affirmed her place within British arts and letters as one of the most influential contemporary British writers, comparable to esteemed British authors Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, David Foster Wallace, and more recently, Andrea Levy and Bernadine Evaristo. When Smith published White Teeth, she was merely a college student with wisdom beyond her years, using her writing to wrestle with provocative issues of the day, such as religious fundamentalism, eugenics, multiculturalism, and race and identity. Today, although Smith is a mature woman (a wife and mother of two children and professor in the Creative Writing Program at New York University), there are still traces of ←1 | 2→the self-conscious teen trying to understand life’s biggest questions. Since the mid aughts, Smith has been preoccupied with digital technology. Like many writers in the digital age, Smith has reconciled with technology’s impact on society. Similar to the writers of the industrial age, she has been forced to adapt to a changing world, and her fiction and non-fiction reflect upon Big Tech’s impact on her fiction, her craft, and the broader society. In interviews, she expresses her aversion to social media, because of its effect on her mental health, productivity, and personal relationships. As a writer who focuses on the importance of human relationships, technology is an ever present adversary and with great frequency, Smith bemoans digital technology’s invasiveness and interruption of the natural world and the disconnection between the real and the manufactured worlds of the internet.

In the article, “This is How It Feels To Me,” she responded to Wood’s critique of White Teeth, as well as other writers he chastised for writing hysterical realistic prose: “The critic James Wood appeared in this paper last Saturday aiming a hefty, well-timed kick at what he called “hysterical realism”. It is a painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose ←2 | 3→to be found in novels like my own novel White Teeth and a few others he was sweet enough to mention” (Smith 2001). To some degree Smith agreed with Wood’s assessment of her writing, but rejected grouping together the work of a novice writer like herself, with established authors and label them all as hysterical realists. Smith argued,