The 21st century according to Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith slowly opens the door to her home in Willesden, northwest London, and sticks her head out.

She looks at us somewhat confused.

"Oh, it's you, come in," she says.

But she doesn't finish opening the door.

She fixes her gaze across the street, where the photographer has parked his car.

"Ah, you have rented one of those that are taken by the hour," she comments, awarding us a point for advanced level London management.

She opens the door a little wider.

When the photographer asks if it would be possible for us to park the car in her driveway, we immediately miss the point.

The author puts on an annoyed face and turns around towards the interior of her house.

A minute later Nick Laird appears, Northern Irish poet and novelist, and husband of the author of

with his car keys in hand and a pacifying smile.

From the kitchen you can hear the writer: "Wait for me in the living room, please."

A few minutes later, Smith appears and proposes to do the interview in her office, on the first floor of this typical north London house, narrow, with three floors, kitchen in semi-basement and a garden in the back.

She is her her home, to which she returned after a decade in the US — she returned to London in 2020 — where she moved in with her family and taught creative literature at New York University.

“All the writers teach there, it is the only way to be able to pay the rent, which is very expensive.

Of those I knew, only Jonathan Franzen allowed himself not to teach, and he ended up moving to California, ”she recalls sitting in her office,

tossing and turning in a wheeled chair that doesn't seem particularly expensive or terribly comfortable.

He has reserved a sofa for us in which some junk is accumulated that seems to belong to his 8 and 12-year-old children, including an iPad that will be about to fall on the floor during the entire interview.

“I came back here, home,” she says, looking out the window at the garden.

He could have gone anywhere, we tell him.

And she looks at us angrily.

"Re crazy?

Where was she going to go?

She had this house.

The boys' school is here.

Changing implied a huge move, packing things…”.

he says looking out the window into the garden.

He could have gone anywhere, we tell him.

And she looks at us angrily.

"Re crazy?

Where was she going to go?

She had this house.

The boys' school is here.

Changing implied a huge move, packing things…”.

he says looking out the window into the garden.

He could have gone anywhere, we tell him.

And she looks at us angrily.

"Re crazy?

Where was she going to go?

She had this house.

The boys' school is here.

Changing implied a huge move, packing things…”.

"I don't know if I'm a very good friend. I get distracted a lot and I'm writing all the time," says the author of 'White Teeth'. Manuel Vázquez

happens in Willesden ,

the novel that this 47-year-old daughter of a Jamaican and an Englishman published in 2000 and that, at 25, made her the first great literary phenomenon of the 21st century.

She also much of the subsequent literary corpus of hers, including a foray into the theater, the comedy entitled The Bride of Willesden.

But she came back here because she was too lazy to put things in boxes.

was a sweeping treatise on multicultural London that was read at full speed and aroused vocations.

It is likely that many of the writers who a couple of years ago stopped considering themselves young storytellers decided to dedicate themselves to this after reading that book.

Two years later, her second novel,

also located in London, gravitated around criticism of the new forms of fame, many of which she had experienced in the first person after the success of her debut.

The third,

(2005), set in New England, was a kind of transcription of EM Forster that surprised by her recording and recovered part of the pulse lost with her previous work.

Then,

returned to the British capital and recovered the multicultural spirit of White Teeth, although this time it focused more on the material than on the racial.

Her latest novel to date,

, addresses her childhood passion for dance (Smith was a fan of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films) and delves into one of the topics that most interests her: friendship.

"Even though I don't know if I'm a very good friend," she chimes in.

“I get distracted a lot and I am writing all the time.

Working.

Writing takes a lot of time and always seems very urgent, when the truth is that you could take a week off and nothing would happen.

I don't know many writers who go out to eat with their friends.

It is better to go out drinking in the evening.

I respect friendship, but I think a lot of people my age find out that they actually have far fewer friends than they thought.

Friendship is a complicated sport, like marriage.”

"It is difficult to imagine being 18 years old and going through a pandemic. If sometimes a young person pisses me off, I immediately think about what he had to go through that... and it goes away," says Zadie Smith. Manuel Vázquez

In addition to her five novels, the Englishwoman has published three books of essays, the last one,

written during and about the pandemic.

Her latest publication is

a volume of stories that is at the same time a farewell letter to New York, an essay on new formats and a catalog of reflections.

The writer Jordi Puntí, a follower of the author from the beginning and with whom he shared the stage in a talk in 2017 in La Pedrera (Barcelona) on the occasion of the launch of Swing Times, highlights his facet as an essayist: “He entertains and creates elements of debate that always have to do with its great themes: immigration, social, racial.

I think her essays are a good way to learn to read her novels.

The relationship between what she writes and what she thinks is very well defined in the essays”.

Sigrid Kraus, editor of Salamandra, which publishes Zadie Smith's books in Spain, has been there even before the Englishwoman finished writing White Teeth.

She has lived the birth and development of a writer in whom the 21st century has turned all her vices and virtues.

“The agent sent me a few pages of White Teeth and I was fascinated.

At that time she was convinced that you should never hire anything without reading it in its entirety.

He wanted to wait for it to be finished, but he was also afraid of losing it.

So I made an offer.

It was low, but I promised that when I could read it in its entirety I would upload it.

I loved.

For me it is still a miracle.

How could he understand the world so well like that at that age?

No experience,” Kraus recalls.

literary

The editor recalls how many veteran colleagues despised her as a somewhat liquefied version of Salman Rushdie or even Hanif Kureishi.

How her photogenicity and her ability to appear the same week in a literary supplement, in a women's magazine and in a tabloid only confirmed the old guard's suspicions about that young narrator.

"I am very curious and I never try to force my opinion above anything else," she comments on her facet as an essayist. Manuel Vázquez

All this ended up affecting the writer.

“There was a point, after her second novel, when she was very pissed off at the world, in a very bad mood,” recalls Kraus.

“She made me laugh because she looked like a teenage girl, she didn't feel like doing anything.

They asked him: 'Why did you title the novel like that?'

And she told me: 'Sigrid, you answer that I no longer answer that…'.

Or they told him: 'In your book you anticipate the lack of understanding between Islam and the Western world…”.

And she said that the fact that a journalist asks a girl like her that, who had only written a novel, meant that the world is very bad.

Then she was very wise to go to the US. There you are always one more, because there are so many people, so much talent.

She met Toni Morrison and it went very well.

Today I see her as the Margaret Atwood of her generation,

a wise woman with an incredible ability to unite the everyday with the transcendental.

She makes some wonderful, amazing, lucid connections.”

Perhaps the way in which she was dismissed by her elders in the beginning means that today Smith does not feel any interest in joining any generational battle, despite the fact that, at her age, she is already absolutely legitimate to speak a lot and badly about youth. , to repeat the mistakes that their elders made before.

“I hate that older people have opinions about young people, it pisses me off”, intervenes somewhat angrily.

“Well, I have mine about them, but I'm telling you now that I'm not going to share them with a Spanish journalist.

I have students and I know them a little.

Look, in the end they are soft as we all are.

Let's be fair, young people also have opinions about us, I guess it's a generational pattern that repeats itself.

I don't know, I think it's hard to imagine being 18 and going through a pandemic.

If sometimes a young man pisses me off, I immediately think that he has had to go through that… and I get over it”.

The writer remembers when a few years ago, no longer suspected of being young and inexperienced, she declared in an interview that the first time she visited Jamaica with her mother, she did not like it at all.

A tremendous stir arose.

“But I was referring to the fact that they had taken me as a teenager.

That summer I just wanted to stay in London with my friends, like all teenagers, not go to an island with my mother.

I wanted to spend the days in Camden.”

Someone knocks on the office door.

It is the photographer and, behind him, his assistant.

Zadie notices this new presence.

"Oh, look, there's another one."

Fernando, the assistant, introduces himself.

“Hello, Fernando, how is he doing?” she says.

In a brief conversation we confirm that the photos will be in the living room and that Zadie is hungry.

She is going to order something to eat.

Also that she does not feel like talking about Brexit.

"It's something old.

When it happened I wasn't here, I was in New York.

I don't have anything original to say about that, really”, she settles the issue as she will settle the following attempts to deal with topics that she doesn't feel like or that she thinks the journalist hasn't finished formulating correctly.

Today, the author of On Beauty is going to carefully select what she is going to talk about.

"It's not scientific, I can't write about everything," he says.

“But I'm interested in quite a few topics, which makes things a lot easier for me when I sit down to write.

I always try to find where the subject I deal with dwells, find it in its natural place, not drag it to mine.

I am very curious and never try to force my opinion on anything.

For this reason, many times, when I make a supposed criticism, I end up making more of a description.

I am attracted to bring clarity.

The truth is that I don't really care how someone feels about anything.

I am not interested in the opinions of the people who publish their ideas about the world, I do not read columnists who are mere opinion-makers.

What the Londoner doesn't seem to be very interested in right now is embracing two of the most common resources among current writers: autofiction and writing for television.

Regarding the former, she admits to being surprised that a new name has been found for something that Proust was already doing, and although she claims to have tried to write in the first person, she confesses that “it has not been possible”.

“I come from the tradition of the English novel, which is social and in the third person.

The first person limits a lot.

Writing in the third person is much more enriching,” she says.

As for entering the universe of platforms and series, the author admits that television these days needs an amount of drama and action that it doesn't seem capable of providing.

“I find it very vulgar.

I can't write that way, mine is always too long and perhaps lacks the narrative energy that television requires.

The truth is that I still don't want to write for TV.

Two, three years, producers, trips to Los Angeles... I don't want that."

Zadie Smith has been writing a new novel set in 19th-century England for more than four years.

"One of the few good things about middle age is that when you write you don't feel like you're going into decline," says the writer. Manuel Vázquez

The food arrives.

The writer leaves the office and returns a moment later with a cardboard bowl full of nachos with things in different colors.

She opens it and, by some strange connection, she remembers the time when she wrote profiles for outlets like

Eminem's —the writer is a big fan of hip hop— for

it's unforgettable.

“I hate doing profiles, transcribing… I don't do them anymore.

You are going to have to transcribe this”, she warns with a certain malice, as she notices that she is missing a fork to be able to eat what he is now holding with both hands.

She disappears again and, returning, enters a reflective and somewhat morose mode.

We do not know what effect the cutlery has on the narrator's psyche.

“One of the few good things about middle age is that when she writes one she doesn't feel like she's going down.

She feels very lucky to have decided to dedicate herself to writing, because this does not happen with almost anything.

You gain resources, solutions.

At my age, almost everything is already in decline.

Minus the words.

Of course, the matter has a reverse.

I may find it easier to write, but I have far fewer things to write about.

In short, I enjoy my job.”

But he hardly finds time to do it anymore.

“I have two children, I write when they are in school.

I stop in summer, at Christmas.

I have spoken with many young writers and, of course, the same thing happens to all of us.

I wish I could write every day.

Look, there is an English psychologist who has been publishing successful books for 20 years and she can only write on Wednesdays, when she has no patients.

She is crazy.

I'm tired, very tired all the time.

All the people of my generation are.

And look, I like my generation, we are nice people”.

there is an English psychologist who has been publishing successful books for 20 years and can only write on Wednesdays, when she has no patients.

She is crazy.

I'm tired, very tired all the time.

All the people of my generation are.

And look, I like my generation, we are nice people”.

there is an English psychologist who has been publishing successful books for 20 years and can only write on Wednesdays, when she has no patients.

She is crazy.

I'm tired, very tired all the time.

All the people of my generation are.

And look, I like my generation, we are nice people”.

Smith is now waging a bloody battle against a nacho that refuses to give in to the pressure of the fork.

We take advantage of that moment of distraction to change the subject.

The only thing we achieve is to bother her again.

Her intelligence is as great as it is intimidating.

“For me, art is political.

It's just the opposite of what you said”, she intervenes with such energy that she finally manages to break that rebellious nacho.

“The debate is about complexity or banality, not about whether or not art should be political.

The problem is the banality of ideas.

It has always been like this.

Maybe you're confusing neutral with sane.

I am not neutral, I am interested in the truth and freedom of thought.

I don't think those are neutral things."

She sets the bowl on the desk and looks out the window.

“I don't want to do anything else, just write.

Sometimes it is very complicated.

It's sitting here looking at that garden for 20 years.

Seen this way, it doesn't sound very attractive.

But it's what I want.

Oops, I didn't offer you food, how rude."

50% off

Subscribe to continue reading

read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber