I’m not talking about politics (although that too), but rather how we interact with the people with whom we share the world. Such issues continue to infuse the present, although their salience is complicated by the ways the virus has eroded collective trust. She is a spectacular essayist - even better, I’d say, than as a novelist - who has written searchingly about race and culture, identity and place and family. Smith is aware of such criticism, yet even as she grapples with it she maintains the interiority that makes essays distinct. (Think of Frieda Hughes’ “ Forty-Five,” 45 poems published around her 45th birthday, or Heidi Julavits’ mash-up diary “ The Folded Clock.”) The essential form of this moment, it appears, is the essay, which has proliferated like a contagion of its own. There are certain books that take their form from circumstance: the manner - or even the moment - in which they were composed. But really, her subject is the strange, dislocated present we occupy. Smith is referring in part to what she describes (invoking herself in the third person) as “the social protections of her youth, which had not seemed to her dreams, but rather mundane realities - universal health care, free university education, decent public housing - all now recast as revolutionary concepts” in America, where the British-born author lives part of the year. “What modest dreamers we have become,” Zadie Smith writes midway through her new book, “ Intimations,” which gathers six short essays that seek to reckon with the experience of pandemic life. More than that, though, it masterfully captures many Black Americans’ pain and disorientation at having the white world begin to register en masse what James Baldwin termed the “dread, chronic disease” of racism in 1955.If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores. Intimations mirrors many white Americans’ shift from the stasis of quarantine to the sudden, incandescent rage of injustice. It’s worth reading the paragraph in full, if only to get a glimpse at the depth of Smith’s hard-earned exhaustion. I don’t think that anymore,” Smith concludes, devastatingly. “I used to think that there would one day be a vaccine: that if enough Black people named the virus, explained it, demonstrated how it operates, videoed its effects.I thought if that knowledge became as widespread as could possibly be managed or imagined that we might finally reach some kind of herd immunity.
Titled “Contempt as a Virus,” Smith’s essay skillfully and effectively relates the virus currently plaguing America to the one that has killed and brutalized scores of Black people since the country’s founding: structural racism.
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