Dead and Alive essays explore culture, politics and literature

TRIALS
Dead and Alive
Zadie Smith
Hamish Hamilton, $36.99

Zadie Smith has written six novels; the first one – White TeethPublished when she was in her early 20s, her book became an instant bestseller. Others have achieved varying degrees of commercial and critical success. Over time, he followed the same path with essays and short stories.

Dead and Alive It is his fourth work of nonfiction and displays the same wisdom and grace as his previous essays. These 30 contributions are wide-ranging, including excursions into book, art, and film criticism, as well as tributes to writers such as Martin Amis, Philip Roth, Hilary Mantel, and Joan Didion. There’s also a love letter to New York; Thoughts on the meaning of “not growing old” and ideas on the art of writing. As with any type of random writing, some pieces will resonate with the reader more than others. If certain topics don’t interest you, Smith offers this neat reminder in his preface: “You have freedom of movement within the covers of this book, and that freedom is absolute.

The collection opens with several surveys of specific art objects; here Smith also talks about the “pesky white male gaze,” exoticization, fetishization, and Eurocentric vision. He then takes a deep dive. tar Film starring Cate Blanchett as chef, also in crisis and “least fashionable” (2022) [one] on earth: the middle-age kind.” As a fellow Generation Xer (Smith is 50) tar the character is both empathetic and scolding: “Old people are vampires. They hoard ancient resources. They use status, power, and youth itself to distract themselves from the inevitable,” but then another salvo for thought: “Why does female ambition and desire have to be so monstrous?”

With his sharp perspective and sarcastic comments, Smith is as agile as a literary critic as well as a visual arts and cinema critic.

One of the highlights Dead and Alive It is a nuanced approach to representation in fiction. Instead of the problematic term “cultural appropriation,” he suggests, what if we think of it as “interpersonal voyeurism” or “deep fascination with the other?” It may be provocative to some readers, but Smith does not believe in the idea that “we can and should only write about people who are fundamentally ‘like’ us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally.” He states that if he had remained true to this dogma, he would never have written any of his books. After all, storytelling is an invitation to inhabit a hypothetical space where you “dream of access to everything that is not yourself.” In the end, it is, of course, up to the reader to decide on the believability of the characters presented before them.

Given the author’s Jamaican-British heritage, it’s no surprise that there are articles about race: a review of a book about Black England, a foreword to a study of African-American culture in New York, and an insight into black freedom of expression through the work of artist Kara Walker. But Smith also has broad political reach, with contributions to Trump, Gaza and the 2024 British and American elections.

Elsewhere there is a series of obituaries with lively and entertaining snapshots of various influential literary men and women. He may disagree with aspects of Amis’s, Roth’s, or Morrison’s works or personal beliefs, but Smith reflects, “Whenever I think of the many writers who have left their mark on my own writing in one way or another, I am reminded that you don’t have to be in perfect harmony with someone to be indebted to them…”