I finished Swing Time over the weekend and I absolutely loved it.
It was such a multi-layered novel that incorporated much more than I would have ever imagined (race, family, wealth, poverty, charity, motherhood, celebrity, white-saviorism, music, dance, ambition, marriage, female friendship, even cyberbullying). I’m so impressed with Zadie Smith’s ability to make such a personal story about the narrator’s life feel so global and universal. Very few aspects of the narrator’s life were similar to my own experiences, and yet so much of it felt deeply familiar to me.
I think what resonated the most for me were the depictions of female friendship, particularly in childhood and as teenagers when there’s such a delicate balance of power between girls, as well as competition (the term “frenemy” comes to mind). I never had one specific friend like Tracey, but I certainly had my share of difficult female friendships and friendship “break-ups” over the years. In the case of Swing Time, the bond between the two women was lifelong, based on shared experiences as mixed-race women who often felt they truly belonged only with each other. Despite the ups and downs and, at times, years passing without speaking to each other, they could never quite escape each other and the memories of their childhood friendship.
I also loved the mother-daughter relationship between the narrator and her mom and how that changed over time. Originally, her mother’s ambition was something she resented, but as an adult, though their relationship was never perfect, I enjoyed seeing the narrator grow to accept her mother as the person she was rather than who she’d always wanted her to be.
Swing Time wasn’t a perfect novel, and dragged a little at times, but overall it was written so beautifully that I barely noticed the slower bits because I was so enthralled by the use of language. I’m just in awe of Zadie Smith’s writing and the way she describes things. I dog-eared so many pages that had sentences or paragraphs that I just adored. I really enjoyed the overall structure as well, with the chapters switching between different time periods in the narrator’s life and seeing everything come together at the end in the present, which didn’t so much wrap things up as leave the future wide open, in a hopeful way. In a lot of ways, I felt that this was sort of like literary “chick lit,” and I one-hundred percent mean that as a compliment: I found it incredibly readable and real and the relationships (whether good or bad) between the different women in the story were what ultimately held this novel together.
The plot itself was subtle and it was very character-driven, so if you’re not into that, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this one for you. However, this was my second Zadie (the first was White Teeth, which I also loved and highly recommend) and I’m already trying to figure out which of her novels I want to read next.