The foreword of Zadie Smith’s collection of essays, Changing My Mind, contains a line that will stop you cold. She states that “ideological inconsistency is, for me, practically an article of faith.” It’s the type of sentence that seems almost casual, but it sticks with you for days. It reframes something crucial for a writer who has been read, praised, sometimes criticized, and constantly discussed since White Teeth debuted in 2000. She’s not acting confidently. She was never.
It may not seem important, but that admission is crucial. The majority of public intellectuals have a tendency to project authority, particularly when writing about literature, culture, race, and class. Smith takes the opposite route. Her essays contradict themselves. They zigzag. After coming to a decision, they discreetly withdraw from it. In contrast to how a cautious person typically presents themselves in print, readers who have followed her career occasionally express a sense that she writes the way a cautious person actually thinks.
The same restlessness can be seen in her more recent work, especially in the collection Dead and Alive, which is shaped by the particular fears of growing older in a world that seems unstable all the time. Smith talked about feeling like a “posthumous entity”—present in the room but somehow already behind glass—during a recent literary prize ceremony in Ohio. She is fifty years old. The comment was humorous rather than depressing. However, it endured, in part because it depicts the realities of what happens when a writer who grew up in one cultural era finds herself working in a completely different one.
It’s possible that readers react to Smith’s attention to the process of changing her mind rather than any one of her arguments. She writes about suffering with a precision that breaks through the typical competitive hierarchies of grief in Intimations, her collection from the pandemic era. Smith maintains that a 17-year-old who commits suicide during a lockdown because she is unable to see her friends is not suffering any less than a nurse who is not wearing the proper PPE. According to her, suffering is inextricably linked to the person who is experiencing it. It cannot be neatly arranged according to privilege. Refusing to take the simple moral shortcut is an uncomfortable way of thinking. However, it is clearly honest.
Her most uncomfortable essays are frequently the ones that garner the greatest praise. She acknowledges that she was uncomfortable after using a homeless man she met as inspiration for a short story. She acknowledges that she finds it hard to believe her own assertion that there isn’t much of a difference between writing novels and baking banana bread, but she says it nonetheless without easing the tension. It is uncommon to be willing to leave the contradiction unsolved. The majority of writers clean up before guests arrive.
Readers appear to split roughly along those lines because her literary criticism functions differently from her personal essays. The close readings of David Foster Wallace, Zora Neale Hurston, E.M. Forster, and Kafka require sincere effort. The Wallace essay, which is about fifty pages long, has sections that are dense, looping, and occasionally testing, almost like a graduate seminar. Even so, there’s a feeling that Smith is solving a problem in real time rather than coming to a predetermined conclusion. The Hurston essay stands out in particular. Smith recounts how, at the age of fourteen, she was dismissed because she wanted to be a “objective aesthete” rather than someone who merely identified with what she read, and how, in just three hours, the book completely destroyed her.
The line regarding ideological inconsistency as an article of faith in the foreword confession allows readers to interpret her in that manner. As a writer who is willing to contradict herself between the covers of the same book, rather than as an authority who arrives with answers. Reading her across several collections gives me the impression that the inconsistency is the point. that it is more in line with intellectual integrity than any smooth, flawless stance would be. It’s difficult to ignore how uncommon that is and how much it clarifies why her essays, even the challenging ones, seem worthwhile.
