Novelist’s gifts shine through in essays

December 29, 2009|Nicole Cammorata, Globe Staff

It’s easy to love Zadie Smith. In her most recent work, the nonfiction collection “Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays,’’ the 34-year-old Smith writes as if already in the middle of a conversation with her reader. Her writing is wonderfully accessible and full of acute observations - a casual tone that allows the reader to feel close to both the words and their author, no matter what the topic.

For Smith devotees and newcomers alike, the 17 essays are a welcome insight into the author’s world of literature, film, and family dynamics. The book is organized into five thematic sections - Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering. It’s all here: from the week she spent reporting on the socio-economic conditions in Liberia to what it was like to celebrate Christmas growing up in a multiracial home; from Hollywood glamour to a 43-page appreciation of the work “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men’’ and its author, the late, great David Foster Wallace.

Though primarily a fiction writer best known for “White Teeth’’ and “On Beauty,’’ Smith brings her novelist’s gifts - an eye for detail, a languid turn of phrase - to the essay form. The first section, in which Smith explores the works of some influential literary greats - Kafka, Barthes, Nabokov, and Hurston - is smart and insightful. However, occasionally this section veers into tedious territory - more scholarly extrapolation than the average reader may have bargained for. Luckily, the essays in the remaining four sections go faster than the first. It’s a disservice to the rest of the content to put the scholarly stuff up front; anyone plucking the book off the shelf is apt to see this first section and think it a different kind of book. What remains in the other four sections is a great collection of musings on topics such as popular films (she asserts that “Date Movie’’ is the worst movie she’s ever seen), Katharine Hepburn (“from the earliest age I was devoted to her’’), and the significance of President Obama’s oratory excellence.

But exclude that first section and you leave out a portion of who Smith is. And identity is exactly what Smith is exploring; this is the axis upon which each essay turns. Writer and reader. Black and white. Critic and fan. Independent woman and responsible daughter. As a whole, the essays illuminate who Smith is in the process of becoming, including the reader on her journey.