I freely admit that I love Zadie Smith. She's smart, self-conscious, aggravating and one of the most careful and insightful readers I've come across. Smith has a level of engagement and understanding with what she reads that I envy – I suppose that, despite my affectations, I'm not an overly academic reader, and many of the allusions and sensibilities that she is able to detect and analyse are lost on me as a reader of fiction. As a reader of essays, though, and of her essays, I find myself crying, “Yes! EXACTLY!” on almost every page, even when she is writing about books I've never read.
Her essay on E.M. Forster, or more specifically her review of The BBC Talks of E.M. Forster, is a good example of this. I read Howard's End a few years ago and have to confess that I took little pleasure from it, most likely because Forster's light touch went entirely over my head so I really had no idea what was happening most of the time but pressed on because I vainly hoped that it would become apparent at the end (or the End, as it were). It was frustrating and left me absolutely none the wiser about Forster as an author. Or, let's be honest, about Howard's End as a novel. Or as an End. Who was Howard, anyway? I have no idea. Obviously I am no great expert in this field, but Smith's gentle treatment of Forster's character, his oeuvre, and his approach to his work as a broadcaster makes me want to know more. It makes me wish that I could deduce such things from my own readings, and if I can't, then I would wish to have Zadie leaning over my shoulder at all times, quietly pointing out all the richness I'm unable to see for myself.
Her essay on Middlemarch, on the other hand, illuminates my existing feelings about that novel with far more clarity than I ever could:
One of the reasons we idolise the nineteenth-century English novel is the way its methods, aims and expression seem to beautifully integrated. Author, characters and reader are all striving in the same direction. Eliot, speaking of Dorothea's mind, describes the process this way: “The reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good.” It is a fine description of what all good novelists try to do, after their own fashion.
The thing that I love most about Middlemarch, surely that all of its many appreciators love, is that it is the story of change in all its forms – personal, communal, physical, philosophical, and so on – the “reaching forward” that Dorothea describes. Eliot shows us that not all changes need to be grand in order to be significant, and the journey from innocence to experience, in whatever banal or extravagant form that may take, is common to us all. In a slight digression, this has reminded me that it is probably time for me to revisit Middlemarch. It doesn't feel like summer reading though, I think it is a novel more appropriate for the changing of seasons. Perhaps I'll save it for the autumn reading list, if I make one.
At other points, I become irritated with Changing My Mind in a way that I find hard to justify. Smith's film reviews, while surely at least a little tongue in cheek, are so grindingly superior in tone that I want to hurl the book across the room. The frustrating part being that, mostly, I agree with her – I haven't seen Date Movie but I suspect I, too, would be “repulsed by the children it is meant for and dread the adults they will become”. Without having seen it I don't doubt that it is utter crap, and yet all I can think is, “Am I that up myself?”
Perhaps I am, as the book is retrieved from the proverbial floor when Smith writes about some of her cinematic loves – Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo. I'm back on board wholeheartedly when she has this to say about Werner Herzog and Grizzly Man:
Herzog (whose voice-over perfectly matches The Simpsons's hard man, Rainier Wolfcastle) is an infamously egomaniacal auteur nutjob (i.e., a great European director) with a bent for the Germanically literal (To pay off a bet he once made a movie called Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. It did not disappoint.)
The high point of the collection though, surely, is her essay on David Foster Wallace. Although I can claim to have endured/loved Infinite Jest, I can say with certainty that I have hardly skimmed the surface of what is really in that novel, not to mention the rest of DFW's work. He is a writer I love to read about - I suppose all DFW fans probably fetishise writing about his life and work, looking for answers and guidance, as Smith says, searching for the key to unlock the text. Really, in the end, that is what being a good reader of David Foster Wallace, and a good reader of any fiction, of life, is all about. Changing My Mind shows us what a good reader aspires to be. Smith would argue, though, that the key is always within the text. Read, and re-read, until you find it.
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