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A review by millennial_dandy
Intimations by Zadie Smith
3.0
3.5
I don't typically read essay collections because though one given essay may pique my interest, it's rare that the collection as a whole is something I'd want to commit to, particularly a collection of essays all by the same author.
Zadie Smith is, of course, an incredibly well-regarded writer, and is best known, perhaps, for her novel 'White Teeth'.
I haven't read any of her novels, but 'Intimations' gives me a sense of the flavor I might expect, and I liked what I tasted.
This collection was of particular interest to me as it must be one of the very first published works of any genre covering the COVID-19 pandemic given that it was published in the summer of 2020.
In some ways, her words about those early months feel very distant given how gruelling the long-haul has been, dulling some of my memories of the months of panic and lockdown she's largely ruminating on. But I do think it's important to have documents like this, almost especially because I think for so many of us those early months of the pandemic feel like some kind of collective fever dream.
She writes in 'Intimations' about how much pressure we were all feeling to be productive during lockdown with this sudden wealth of time on our hands.
The general vibe of that portion of the collection reminded me strongly of an Onion article headline from the same period:
I know that's definitely how I feel looking back. There's a part of me that thinks: 'dangit, Ren. You could have used all that time so much more productively!'
Smith never uses the word 'trauma' to describe why people in the spring and summer of 2020 might not have gotten around to writing the next 'Great American novel'--I don't think we were quite ready to call the pandemic traumatic back in July 2020. But it was certainly traumatic for me, though my experience was likely better than some and worse than others. So I try not to be so hard on 2020 me for all the books I didn't write, bread I didn't bake, and languages I didn't learn. I got myself and my kitty back home from abroad and then both of us across the border to reunite with my partner. Humbly, I feel like that's not too shabby.
The final essay, 'Contempt as a Virus' has been regarded by many of the reviewers as the best of the lot. And I can understand why. Smith draws a powerful comparison between the literal virus behind the pandemic to a metaphorical virus of contempt leading to the mistreatment of Black and brown people in America.
Though I agreed with everything she drew attention to in her essay, the content of her ideas are fairly well known to most leftists and certainly to People of Color.
Consequently, 'Contempt as a Virus' wasn't the one that stuck with me. What has stuck with me from this reading experience was the description she gave of a conversation between herself and a neighbor. Unbeknownst to her neighbor, Smith is preparing to return to England to weather the pandemic there rather than in her adopted home of NYC. Her neighbor tells her that they're all in this together, and they'll all look out for each other and see the thing through together as neighbors, as a community. Smith describes her feelings of shame and sadness at hearing what is meant as a reassuring message because she knows she is in fact running away, not facing the danger with her neighbors.
This especially resonated with me as someone who also fled the country I was in at the start of the pandemic (Russia) for the country of my birth (the USA). And I too felt a similar sense of betraying my neighbors and my community by 'running away.' It was, of course, more complicated than that (which Smith obviously knew as well), but that feeling of wanting to stick something out with your community while knowing that that might not be what's best for you is a very strange and uncomfortable cognitive dissonance.
In these early essays, she captures the ominous first days of the pandemic so vividly that her words really did bring back a lot of the feelings I think many of us had at the beginning. Feelings of shock, mostly, that the ground could shift under us so suddenly; something practically unknown to those of us lucky enough to live in countries with relative stability. The collective trauma has come in hindsight, but the shellshock of that announcement: '11 March 2020: The WHO declares the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic' and the shock of the subsequent lockdowns, seeing the streets of Moscow empty, Times Square empty, that shellshock has worn off, but in her essays, Smith really knows how to evoke the ghost of it.
Because this collection really is the result of Smith's raw initial and incredibly subjective experience, not all of it will work for everyone. Some might say that none of it reflects their experience of the pandemic's early months or of the civil unrest in the summer of 2020, but I personally found a lot of it to be cathartic, if perhaps (in retrospect) a tad naive. But that might just be my addled 2022 pandemic-fatigued mind talking.
It's an interesting, short read. Give it a try.
I don't typically read essay collections because though one given essay may pique my interest, it's rare that the collection as a whole is something I'd want to commit to, particularly a collection of essays all by the same author.
Zadie Smith is, of course, an incredibly well-regarded writer, and is best known, perhaps, for her novel 'White Teeth'.
I haven't read any of her novels, but 'Intimations' gives me a sense of the flavor I might expect, and I liked what I tasted.
This collection was of particular interest to me as it must be one of the very first published works of any genre covering the COVID-19 pandemic given that it was published in the summer of 2020.
In some ways, her words about those early months feel very distant given how gruelling the long-haul has been, dulling some of my memories of the months of panic and lockdown she's largely ruminating on. But I do think it's important to have documents like this, almost especially because I think for so many of us those early months of the pandemic feel like some kind of collective fever dream.
She writes in 'Intimations' about how much pressure we were all feeling to be productive during lockdown with this sudden wealth of time on our hands.
The general vibe of that portion of the collection reminded me strongly of an Onion article headline from the same period:
I know that's definitely how I feel looking back. There's a part of me that thinks: 'dangit, Ren. You could have used all that time so much more productively!'
Smith never uses the word 'trauma' to describe why people in the spring and summer of 2020 might not have gotten around to writing the next 'Great American novel'--I don't think we were quite ready to call the pandemic traumatic back in July 2020. But it was certainly traumatic for me, though my experience was likely better than some and worse than others. So I try not to be so hard on 2020 me for all the books I didn't write, bread I didn't bake, and languages I didn't learn. I got myself and my kitty back home from abroad and then both of us across the border to reunite with my partner. Humbly, I feel like that's not too shabby.
The final essay, 'Contempt as a Virus' has been regarded by many of the reviewers as the best of the lot. And I can understand why. Smith draws a powerful comparison between the literal virus behind the pandemic to a metaphorical virus of contempt leading to the mistreatment of Black and brown people in America.
Though I agreed with everything she drew attention to in her essay, the content of her ideas are fairly well known to most leftists and certainly to People of Color.
Consequently, 'Contempt as a Virus' wasn't the one that stuck with me. What has stuck with me from this reading experience was the description she gave of a conversation between herself and a neighbor. Unbeknownst to her neighbor, Smith is preparing to return to England to weather the pandemic there rather than in her adopted home of NYC. Her neighbor tells her that they're all in this together, and they'll all look out for each other and see the thing through together as neighbors, as a community. Smith describes her feelings of shame and sadness at hearing what is meant as a reassuring message because she knows she is in fact running away, not facing the danger with her neighbors.
This especially resonated with me as someone who also fled the country I was in at the start of the pandemic (Russia) for the country of my birth (the USA). And I too felt a similar sense of betraying my neighbors and my community by 'running away.' It was, of course, more complicated than that (which Smith obviously knew as well), but that feeling of wanting to stick something out with your community while knowing that that might not be what's best for you is a very strange and uncomfortable cognitive dissonance.
In these early essays, she captures the ominous first days of the pandemic so vividly that her words really did bring back a lot of the feelings I think many of us had at the beginning. Feelings of shock, mostly, that the ground could shift under us so suddenly; something practically unknown to those of us lucky enough to live in countries with relative stability. The collective trauma has come in hindsight, but the shellshock of that announcement: '11 March 2020: The WHO declares the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic' and the shock of the subsequent lockdowns, seeing the streets of Moscow empty, Times Square empty, that shellshock has worn off, but in her essays, Smith really knows how to evoke the ghost of it.
Because this collection really is the result of Smith's raw initial and incredibly subjective experience, not all of it will work for everyone. Some might say that none of it reflects their experience of the pandemic's early months or of the civil unrest in the summer of 2020, but I personally found a lot of it to be cathartic, if perhaps (in retrospect) a tad naive. But that might just be my addled 2022 pandemic-fatigued mind talking.
It's an interesting, short read. Give it a try.