The Novelist: Zadie Smith

The author of White Teeth and The Fraud on writing essays, neighbourhood and the transcendence of Sally Rooney

I remember writing my essay ‘Fascinated to Presume’ and thinking, even as I wrote it, that I didn’t really want to be making that argument. I hated writing it exactly for that reason, because it was a claim of rights, and I was so tired of the competition of everyone else’s rights that some part of me thought, well, I’m a writer, I have rights, and so I wrote a piece about the rights of us as a group.

I’m glad I wrote it, but I wish I didn’t have to defend what we do on the basis of rights. For me, when I’m defending writing, I don’t want to defend it on the basis of rights or on the basis of a global idea. I think writing is local and particular in itself. And actually, the older I’ve got, the more I want my life to be local and particular.

I think there’s a better way of looking at our shared life which has nothing to do with rights.  It rests instead on the facts.

For me, it’s in the idea that human beings suffer and that death is coming. Those two things unite the humanist, the existentialist, the socialist and the Christian. If you don’t have faith, that is the basis on which you are operating. The awareness that death is real and that pain happens.

That’s the basis on which I think most of our writing depends. The ethics of it is this awareness that death is real and the pain happens. The last one is absolutely universal. The second one is partial. Not everybody experiences pain, but almost everybody. And that’s the basis on which you build your characters.

I don’t enjoy polemics. Personally, I try not to write them. But I felt in that moment that writers I love and appreciate were taking up arms against the very word human, or the very word empathy. I felt that was a moment of extremity, and I felt a little bit embattled, and I wanted to try and defend the realm of the human.

But I’m also able to recognise, as Pope Francis did also, that it’s a messy business to attempt to make relations with anybody. My students, for instance, often feel this sense of despair. One of the things the algorithm tells you is that the world’s problems are your problems every day. And if that’s the case, you can’t do anything about them, because you’re nineteen years old. So you feel completely defeated by eight in the morning.

Whereas personally, for my own mental health, I’ve tried to engage locally. I live back in my neighbourhood. I’m back on the street I was born on, so I’m live in a nineteenth-century village kind of way: the people around me I’ve known my whole life. This gives me a sense of agency. I can do something here. I can do something in my street, amongst my people.

And of course, my people in my neighbourhood are very varied. My neighbourhood is hundreds of people from all over the world. So it’s easy for me to say “we,” because I mean all of them.

But I also recognise that people live in monocultures, and write novels from that kind of contained place of rights. You don’t have to conceive of that idea as something that is coming for you.

At the same time, I am totally aware that this language of universalism has been multiply abused over hundreds of years. That began happening from the very first American statement “We the People,” which didn’t mean the people, it meant some of the people, and people like me were three fifths of a person.

So it’s absolutely comprehensible that young people have nothing but suspicion for this language, because language has been abused by creative writers and politicians – in fact, by everybody.

So part of the task is saying to them there’s a difference between an ideal and a practicality, and the ideal is still meaningful, but we have to show them that these ideals can be animated by reality, not just discourse. That’s hard.

All of this means that the biggest struggle is to answer the question of how we create unity with diversity within it. Some of this is to do with discretion.

In front of the gates of my kid’s school, you really do have a hundred languages spoken. You are aware that you are talking to parents who don’t believe in vaccination, and some parents who have beliefs very far from your own. Watching those people speak together, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, black, white, they have a kind of caution. They know what to say and what not to say.

They know where they can speak together and say, well, we all want to be safe. There’s a basis here we can agree on. That’s because our shared humanity is that we’re death-facing as a species.

They approach those conversations with this delicacy. They’re aware that they’re a community. They’re aware there are differences within the community, but they’re able to speak to each other without it becoming purely a binary argument.

We need a language for all this. When it comes to reading, I agree that it’s miraculous people still go out and buy books, still queue up to buy Sally Rooney. The sales of those books are miraculous, and those books are transcendent.

There is an idea of transcendence within them, and a religious idea within them, I think. But I don’t think the readers would express it that way. I think they think those books are about something else. They’re about human intimacy and the idea of a transcendent experience.

And millions of people have responded to those books for that reason.

I often feel really excited about reading because of that. But the question for me is, how come we don’t have a language to describe that experience, or to defend that idea of reading and what it does. Why do we always flatten it?

For instance, I love writing essays. But when I talk to readers, quite often they would prefer to read an essay than a novel. But I think novels contain more mystery. An essay is an argument, and a lot of people feel more comfortable with an argument, because that’s the kind of discourse they engage with all the time.

But when I’m reading a novel, I have a completely different feeling. To me, it’s deeper and more profound. Not because novels are better than essays. Most novels are bad, including mine. Novels are a really hard thing to write. There’s always something wrong with there.

Whereas an essay, you can really make an essay perfect. I think there’s a clue there about the difference – and in that difference is the reason we need novels.