In the spirit of the book, I feel free to say that these essays touched me not one bit although that is not to say that I wasn't interested in parts.

What Smith is able to do is make connections between rappers, discuss art, reflect on how she now thinks differently to her eighteen year old self and write about it gracefully, with diversions off but always swinging round to the starting point. But there were also essays that left me wondering what I was reading about, wondering how many people think like that - the Schopenhauer essay left me cold and thinking that Smith lived in some rarified world where poeple discuss this sort of philosophy around the dinner tables in London, stereotyping her and not setting her free at all.

I was able to appreciate her gratitude for the times in which she was born and raised. Brent Council paying her rent when she attended university and providing the possiblities of attending cultural events and institutions, often for free. These are the things that free minds and are now not necessarily available to all children regardless of parental income. And so, I couldn't help but think that the roots of what set her free have all but rotted away through years of austerity and ignorance (I'm thinking of recent culture ministers here).

In the foreword, Smith comments (brags?) that she teaches on a Master of Fine Arts course but doesn't have one herself and nor does she have a PhD and I think she is saying that this allows her to be more free-thinking. But she does have a degree from Cambridge and if this is the educational background that makes us free then many of us will not achieve it. She feels things, is intimate with them. We all do but we don't necessarily attach words to them that will then be published and free in the world for a reader to respond to.

I recently enjoyed The Fraud but found these essays to be highbrow in their response to culture and therefore sometimes inaccessible. Margo Jefferson wins hands down in the cultural critiquing world for me. ( )

Zadie Smith's Feel Free covers such a variety of topics (she covers everyone from Kierkegaard to Justin Beiber) that it's so hard to pick a favorite, however as a librarian and a lover of Joni Mitchell, I have to say that The North West London Blues and Some Notes on Attunement are huge stand outs for me. I've always found Zadie Smith's writing beautiful, but hearing her thoughts and criticisms on film, art, music, social interactions, and general cultural commentaries really just made me look at her in another dimension. It's amazing how she can sound extremely academic in tone but so accessible at the same time. In each and every work, regardless of the topic at hand, her intellect shines through.

PS: Zadie, you're never too old to discover More Songs About People and Food. ( )

These essays just didn’t hit the right note for me. They were a bit navel-gazing and relied solely on Smith’s voice. I prefer to read essays with more substance and less waxing philosophical about Brexit.

In this collection Zadie Smith solidifies her status as spokesperson for the middle-brow. Smith is (much) better-read than me (and incomparably more successful), yet her continued demonstration of this fact becomes more perplexing as one progresses through the collection. Everything, from 19th century novelists to 20th century philosophers, tumbles before us as so much 'grist for the mill' (negative connotation). Why, having read the work of so many profound thinkers, genius artists, and, a lover of Keats; herself in the unique position of a world-renowned author of prose, can't she find anything interesting to say?

I had previously remarked that the quality of this kind of writing is that it does not communicate, however much it might "infotain" (i.e. entertain in the guise of education, see 'infotainment'). Smith is somehow able to perceive in Sontag (by far the better essayist) the lack of humor which was her greatest weakness : "Dyer is (slightly) dull. In the end he is rescued from the accusation of self-seriousness by his humor. It’s what separates him from [...] Sontag," Yet, Smith is not a humorous author (and doesn't try to be, aside from idiosyncratically quoting Macbeth), and this not to her credit.

In previous work, Changing My Mind: Essays (2009), Smith occasionally provides an insight on a reputed author or famous text, presenting the fruits of research on the subject. As a more established author with an (honestly extensive) internal encyclopedia of works to reference, such endeavors no longer appear necessary and we suffer the loss. As with much of the intellectual/cultural criticism from that collection, Smith's writing continues to reach us as might a dated cultural artifact. If not for reference to contemporary events, I would have trouble believing these essays were written close to 2018 (they feel very much 2008, at least a decade behind the times). Compare with Sontag's work (nearly 50 years later we are still trying to get out from under the shadow of On Photography)

Beginning with an essay on the Climate Emergency with minute-focus on the incommensurability of recent seasons with their historical descriptors in literature - Refreshing, though bizarrely appearing to posit 'narrative disillusionment' of the late 20th century as a potential explanation for contemporary inaction/indifference. Following an imperative call to action (versus acquiescence) Smith never mentions Climate again in 400 subsequent pages (a glaring omission in her essays on Death). A middling effort, though it may be, unfortunately, the best essay in the collection.

In the remaining cultural essays, Smith positions herself as a self-aware "middle class liberal" (to what extent a 4-time international bestselling author is 'middle-class' is not interrogated) who is also a "working-class-author" (due to her upbringing) with Marxist sympathies ('class' is mentioned 90 times in the text) and occasionally using phrases such as "late capitalism". As such, she positions herself as more authentic than the "upper-class":

"There has been a kind of money madness in London for some time and for the rest of us looking on it’s hard to find in such symbols any sign of a beautiful, harmonious, or even happy life (what kind of happy person needs to be seen ordering a £5,000 cocktail?), though at least when you are this rich you can comfortably fool yourself that you are happy, utilizing what the old north London Marxists used to call your “false consciousness.”"

She is also more Hardscrabble than the young left with their no-platforming, and safe spaces,

Kureishi’s point in Buddha is that it can also be very amusing. From the point of view of our twenty-first-century world where the only possible reaction to anything seems to be outraged offense, I find it a relief to go back to that more innocent, hardier time, when we were not all such delicate flowers that every man’s casual idiocy had the awesome power to offend us to our very cores.

Smith considers her milieu the intellectual progenitors of this new generation and views them with a mixture of patronization, annoyance, and (ironically) outrage. Needless to say, this is the exhausting perspective of every "well-educated", "upper-middle-class", "middle-aged", "right-liberal-but-used-to-be-left-wing" adult in Britain, complete with elegies for the (WHITE) working class

That crusty standby won’t work anymore for describing the economically and socially disenfranchised of this nation: they are struggling, deeply unhappy, and they know it. [...] The majority of those who voted Leave did so out of anger and hurt and disappointment [...] In this atmosphere of hypocrisy and deceit, should the working-class poor have shown themselves to be the “better man” when all around them is corruption and venality? When everyone’s building a fence, isn’t it a true fool who lives out in the open?

We have all read this essay before. In the following, impossibly naïve, essay on Facebook we are presented as self-evident the notion that having one's name publicly attached to one's posts (within an insular group of like-minded online 'friends') will make everyone LESS extreme - a take right out of 2008. Zadie Smith continues her bad habit of direct quotation of internet posts carried over from her prior collection (ridiculing poorly-written internet posts in long-form is the lowest form of debate)

"You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX
When I read something like that, I have a little argument with myself: “It’s only poor education. They feel the same way as anyone would, they just don’t have the language to express it.” But another part of me has a darker, more frightening thought. Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive? What’s the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual?*"

The worst travesties in the collection are the misreading of Thomas Bernhard "sonorous, apocalyptic, pop-philosophical bullshit" who may, in fact, be the deepest and most lucid author discussed in this collection. That Smith elevates Woodcutters, Bernhard's worst (and also most popular) work indicates she may be misapprehending him. It takes an author of unremarkable talent to do the same to Kierkegaard, another writer of great (much greater) humor. Here, Smith makes one of the most striking moments in S.K. (one literally exclaims aloud when reading the four-fold exegesis in the prelude to Fear and Trembling) appear, by fault of imprecise summary, as another banal argument being set forth in perfect continuity with the others in this collection. ( )

I think I like Zadie Smith's nonfiction more than her fiction. Watching her gears turn is more pleasurable when she's letting you in on the act! Reading this book was like spending time inside the head of someone more perceptive, sensitive, fair, and articulate than oneself. Okay I'll speak for myself only on this one but, no offense, it's probably true for you too. And isn't that what a good essayist is supposed to do?

She has this way of considering the personal, aesthetic, moral, and political aspects of a piece of art all at once, without giving undue weight to any one of them. And she does this--I think--out of respect to multiplicity; in her world, nothing is fixed, everything is mutable, even (especially?) subjects themselves. This is her novelist-empathy at work. And pretty much nowhere does this lead to lazy equivocation.

You certainly won't find polemic in this collection. If anything, reading essay after essay of reflexive, generous analysis makes one doubt that kind of narrower argument. I'm tempted to say something broad about how Smith's cool, self-doubting, ecumenical style is the perfect antidote to the tribal braying that we are inundated with at the moment--but that would be quite un-Smithean. First off polemic can be good; some things are worth lying for. Second, it's super snobby to say things like that. Instead, let me say something very specific: you will enjoy this book.

P.S. highlights off the top of my head

Essay on libraries
The book reviews
Man vs corpse
Essay on get out and the emmet till painting
Essay on facebook
Essay on Marclay's clock

I have a lot more to say about this but I have no more time to write at the moment. What a pleasure it is to read a smart, empathetic novelist on art and life! ( )