12-08-2020

Though the pandemic is far from over, the competition to determine its sharpest commentator has already begun. Entries began trickling in soon after those first reports from Wuhan, and when the virus eventually made landfall in the US, it was heralded by a flurry of op-eds, think-pieces, and newsletters. By the time we were in the thick of it, bloggers and columnists alike were scrambling to get a word in. Perhaps the fast start was to be expected. After all, there isn’t much for writers to do these days except sit down and write. Even so, some authors stand out for their precocity. Among them is novelist Zadie Smith, who, in late July, just weeks after cities in the US began to loosen their lockdown restrictions, threw her own proverbial hat in the ring with Intimations, a slim collection of essays reflecting on her experience of pandemic life.

In its one hundred and eleven formidable pages, Smith works out what it is she missed most during those early months of the pandemic. In some ways, her answer is obvious. She missed people — though not everyone, and not equally. The book contains precious little about her family (perhaps, like some of us, she had quite enough of them during lockdown), and close friends are mentioned only in passing. Instead, she seems mostly preoccupied with one particular subgroup: strangers.

Unsurprisingly, it seems that strangers, too, fall into the category of things which are appreciated only when they’re gone. And for a few weeks there, they really were gone. All of a sudden, once lockdown began, those of us who aren’t essential workers rarely saw, much less spoke with, anyone we weren’t living with. All the hustle and bustle, the background noise, like a loud, humming AC unit, suddenly turned off. And Smith, a long time resident of New York City who relishes the urban hubbub, seems to have felt that absence keenly.

The book is seasoned with stylish descriptions of rote small talk, conversations overheard in cafes, greetings from friendly yet distant neighbors — moments when, without warning, one of the extras steps into the fore and flips the script, so to speak. Quotidian though they may be, Smith reminds us that these interactions carry with them a certain comfort, reassuring us that, despite our private struggles, life is still happening, and we are not alone.

One such moment triggers the book’s opening essay. One morning, Smith, driven by some inexplicable, primal urge, interrupts her hectic schedule to stop and admire a small community garden in the middle of New York City. Leaning against the bars, she looks up to find two other women in the exact same position, namely, staring wistfully at a couple of tulips while “teetering at the brink of peri-menopause”. The three of them trade shy glances and embarrassed smiles, acknowledging their mutual complicity in the moment’s heavy-handed, almost Freudian symbolism. Anecdotes like these are Smith’s primary vehicle for meaning, and she knows how to make the most of them; they can stretch on for several pages at a time as she deftly weaves in her own editorializing. In the midst of them, it’s easy to forget that one is reading nonfiction.

As far as content goes, the essays toe a delicate line between eclectic and haphazard. From the episode in the community garden she abruptly veers off to discuss Lolita, then makes her way over to her own womanhood (by way of Aretha Franklin), and from there wanders into her artistic motivation before the finally returning to her original subject. One could forgive her meandering, given the circumstances, as a subconscious reaction to being cooped up for so long. This would be a mistake, however; Smith's writing is anything but accidental. Her willful indirection mimics the pleasant chaos of pre-pandemic life, that happy naïveté in which one could conceivably find themselves lingering within six feet of someone outside of their nuclear family. “Writing is resistance”, she explains, a defense as convincing as it concise.

The circuitous paths she carves through her subjects are lined with striking articulations of our new, socially-distanced lifestyle. The humor of the neutered busybody, for example, is not lost on her: “…like pugs who having been lifted out of a body of water, our little limbs keep pumping on”. Smith also knows when to be brutally sober. "Death has come to America", she writes bluntly in the fourth essay, in recognition of both the virus’ fatality rate and the cloud of despair that has descended in its wake.

Smith transitions seamlessly between her personal, moral, and political responses to the virus. Whereas one essay urges us to be liberal with our sympathy — no matter how banal the complaint, or the complainer — another reminds us that the virus itself is hardly egalitarian. It turns out that it, too, respects the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic boundaries which partition the American experience. And though she doesn't rule out the possibility that the a progressive political reckoning will follow in the wake of this tragedy, she is far from optimistic.

Smith’s analytical and narrative skills are woven together in the penultimate section, a series of character-driven vignettes which she calls Screengrabs. They are short, a couple of pages at the most, and each typically takes the form of an intimate portrait which unfolds into a brief but poignant meditation. Her subjects are people with whom Smith shares only a cursory relationship (her masseuse, an elderly neighbor), a fact which makes the depth of her psychological investigations all the more impressive. In less skilled hands, these pieces might have felt forced, poor excuses to wax poetic. Coming from Smith, however, they feel natural, as if her own observations are merely things her characters would have said, if they were ever given the chance. In a later section she offers up what seems to be a summary of her own approach: “Write your own sentences,” she writes, “as if you have no more ownership over the lines than a stranger.”

The most striking element of these vignettes, however, is what Smith leaves out. She focuses almost entirely on her subjects as they were before the pandemic; in one way or another, they’re all struggling to make ends meet. Either by choice or by necessity, Smith leaves it to the reader to imagine what has become of them since. Indeed, drawing out the reader’s concern seems to be the entire point. One is reminded of the quote by Simone Weil: “The love of our neighbors simply means being able to say, ‘What are you going through?’ .” As the pandemic enters yet another wave in the US and we continue to do our best to avoid each other, opportunities to voice this neighborly concern can be few and far between. As with anything else, one fears that without practice, we’ll simply forget how. Fortunately, Smith has provided with Intimations a brief, witty, and effective reminder.