As I'm writing this review, I'm listening to Radiohead's A Moon Shaped Pool, the good partner for the emotion of this novel.
While I was reading the last 100 pages or so, I kept thinking, while driving to work, what to write about it when I finished. The novel doesn't really tell a story you can capture in a few lines, it doesn't hand out a straight line to follow. It's more like in the days before google maps where you had to ask a random stranger which turn to take.
The thing that clung to me, is that this novel is about love. Instead of a romantic tale, Zadie Smith has whipped up a story about someone who thinks she lacks the essence to love. Instead she seeks asylum into dancing, beginning with dance class (in which she doesn't perform too well), befriending a girl that dances better, watching musicals en ultimately even becoming a personal assistent to a singer-musician-dancer.
Instead of seeing this passion for dancing as something within herself, she becomes a kind of rock for others, believing she isn't needful of a more profane connection. It takes a trip to Africa to become more aware of herself.
The protagonist, who is never named, is someone I can identify with, mainly because of her sense of not belonging. Zadie Smith probably worked this out from a racial point of view, but I don't think that 'not belonging' is merely restricted to this category. I even think that emotional estrangement is more profound today, with social media taking up so much of our interactions, that to 'not belong' is becoming a new way of life. I might be nostalgic for my childhood, spending summers meeting dozens of new kids while traveling, while I'm worrying that my own kid doesn't have enough chances to play with her 'age mates'. And what when she's discovering the 'social network'? How will she develop the right tools of connecting with people, if someone who said hello so easily when she was young, is doubting every interaction she has today.
I strayed a bit from what was supposed to be a review. Swing Time isn't Zadie Smith's best novel, but I liked the tension of it. The pure emotion of it, even when restrained.
