Review: ‘Swing Time’

'Swing Time” is a novel of origins and obligations. Zadie Smith - a rightfully acclaimed author whose best-known book may be 2000's 'White Teeth,” her debut novel - introduces us to two friends, each with one black parent and one white parent. The unnamed narrator recounts her friendship with Tracey, a friendship begun in dance class that suddenly crumbles when the women are in their early twenties. Their relationship underpins the novel, even when Tracey is absent from its pages for lengthy stretches.

The novel begins in a working class London neighborhood but eventually we travel the globe with the narrator as she serves as a personal assistant to Aimee, a single-named pop star who decides to invest some of her wealth in improving the lives of girls in a West African village. But Aimee's philanthropy isn't without complications and her tendency toward appropriation - of culture and of people - is problematic.

Smith's narrator struggles to find her place in her ever-widening world. What are her obligations to her domineering and driven mother, her lackadaisical father, her heedless employer, and, in the end, to her childhood friend? Her very namelessness stands in for her difficulty defining herself in terms of something other than her relationship to others.

The question of how our origins - both immediate and in our ancestral past - are central to our lives recurs throughout the novel, as well. The characters each must come to grips with their pasts. Some perhaps allow the past to have too firm a hold on them while others seek to live as though the past never existed. The narrator struggles to understand each approach and to find her own way to a future she can't fully imagine.

'Swing Time” is thematically rich, but those themes never overwhelm the story Smith is telling. Her characters are believably complicated and conflicted. The questions the narrator spends the novel trying to answer are the very questions that underlie our lives, no matter our origins and obligations.