When we first encounter our narrator, who remains unnamed throughout, she’s encamped in a London flat, recently dismissed from her position as personal assistant to an Australian pop-star named Aimee. With her most recent novel, Swing Time, Smith continues her protean evolution by downplaying her characteristic humor and exploring the lives of her characters through a subjective first-person viewpoint, a technique she had not attempted until now. Forster’s Howards End, while NW (2012) refracted contemporary London through a gaze evoking Virginia Woolf - Smith’s vivacious, wide-roving, and often satirical perspective has consistently provided a stylistic through-line. Yet while her techniques and influences have indeed varied over time - On Beauty (2005), for example, paid homage to the domestic interplay of E.M. Ever since James Wood irritably classified Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth (2000) as “hysterical realism,” quite a lot of ink has been spilled praising or deriding the adaptability of her subsequent fiction.
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