Swing Time by Zadie Smith

My rating: ★★★☆☆

In Swing Time, by Zadie Smith, the main character is successful by most standards. She gets a degree and starts working for an international celebrity. She travels, loses touch with what money’s worth and covers her life in a neat veil of denial. All her attempts to better the world are channeled through celebrity Aimee - such is the poverty in some places that money can buy anything, including human lives.

Her childhood friend Tracey, has nothing material. She pursues her childhood dream of becoming a dancer. I found myself hoping for her breakthrough, but life isn’t like that, right?

Dancing is what brought them together as children, and all the remaining common ground they have in the brief slices of adulthood they share. Their friendship has weened to barely a thread.

Intellectually this book is very satisfying and covers a broad number of topics with humour: race, gender, abuse, money, power, sexuality, slavery, friendship, ambition, death, and the list goes on.

It does lack a form of thrill - it was like reading a fictitious autobiography. I struggled with the superficiality of the main character’s life, enjoying mostly the parts when she was – willingly or not – thrust into Tracey’s reality. Tracey brought the book to life in more than one sense, whilst Aimee, the power-money-save-the-world celebrity did not.

Perhaps this is what the author intended: to show that celebrity life is « nothing much » covered in expensive veneer - it did slow the pace for almost 2/3rds of the book though. A few characters caught my attention but most were not characterised to the extent I would have liked.

So, although this was very thought-provoking, and I’m still pursuing some of those lines of thought, this wasn’t a page-turner for me and I didn’t really get « hooked ».

View all my reviews

I read this book as part of the UNO-2021 Challenge on GoodReads (team Mystic Pizza).