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Zadie Smith attends dinner parties.
A few of them are glimpsed in her new collection of essays and criticism,Feel Free.
Thats why its called small talk.
Its a cathedral of boredom.
And when you enter it, it looks a lot like the one you yourself are living in.
Im sorry the phrase bothered her, even if it was secondhand.
I think thatFeel Freemarks an end to the psychodrama phase of her career.
2), shes seen that the world around her isnt quite so boring (see dinner party No.
The first section ofFeel Freeis governed by what Smith calls my particular brand of liberal paranoia.
Libraries and bookstores are vanishing in her corner of Northwest London.
The tone in these essays varies.
Sometimes Smith sounds like an activist, sometimes just another beleaguered liberal.
Ed Miliband wasnt going to do it.
Given Smiths celebrity, you wonder why she doesnt enter politics herself.
Literary celebrities now present themselves like dignitaries at the service of their readership constituencies.
You also wonder why aside from the paychecks she so often writes about celebrities.
He earns comparisons to John Milton and Oulipo.
Literary famous must be something in between being the assistant and being the star.
On the one hand youre famous and rich and flown all over the world just to be you.
On the other hand, compared to Madonna, youre not famous or rich at all.
More anxiety-inducing than fame is aging, and occasionally Smiths remarks on the subject verge on the laughable.
No, you want to tell her, buy the album, or start withTalking Heads: 77. mixed with Nirvanas Smells Like Teen Spirit one early 1990s morning at the London club Fabric while on ecstasy.
But such youthful joys have been replaced in her life more recently by childhood and parenting.
Ho-hum hire a sitter and call the drug dealer.
I dont trust myself in front of a painting as I do when I open a book.
The difference is that Amis was parochial and Dyer is unfailingly open to the world.
The Amis that Smith herself resembles is Martin.
What they share is the predicament of the former wunderkind.
Both burst to fame in their early 20s as truly funny comic novelists.
Both are dedicated students of literature, as good as critics as they are as novelists.
But public seriousness has never been a comfortable fit for either of them.
A turning point for him was the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
Smiths nuanced and ambivalent intervention fit perfectly within the theater of provocation that traditionally emerge during Whitney controversies.
Middle age is no fun.
One of my friends had been in an accident and had both his legs amputated.
And once upon a time I was a track star.
Maybe I was feeling inadequate after reading the work of a superior critic.
Maybe Ive reviewed too many of Smiths books.
One thing I was not feeling was free.
In other words, a zone of freedom and perhaps the only one left to her.
So I offer her this advice: Get a flip phone.
*This article appears in the February 5, 2018, issue of New York Magazine.
