Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”).

Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. I’ve yet to try a banana bread of which one could say the same.At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. But Smith’s raw, visceral book is nonetheless a powerful portrait of what we’re living through. Intimations can be dogmatic (possibly inevitable in these highly charged times) and the next years will no doubt bring more polished reflections. Yet while Smith clearly wants structural change, Intimations is more despairing than hopeful - in one essay, which equates contempt to a virus, she says she no longer thinks there will be a “vaccine” for racism. One might expect a rush-published collection such as this to be an urgent call to arms. Her criticisms are most persuasive when she shows rather than tells, as in the fifth of the six essays, a series of vignettes illustrating the inequality that means New York’s virus map “turns redder along precisely the same lines as it would if the relative shade of crimson counted not infection and death but income brackets and middle-school ratings”.

A slightly harsh indictment of writers, perhaps, but a refreshing change from the usual romanticisation.Īs well as productivity, this slim volume covers race, gender and how badly the New York-based Smith feels both US and UK politicians have handled Covid-19. “They are both just something to do” and are, besides, “no substitute for love”, without which time is meaningless, she argues. A report by Lucy Knight for The Times of London.īefore you chide yourself for having spent lockdown baking or watching Netflix while Zadie Smith has used this time to pen an essay collection, know that the British novelist sees “no great difference” between writing and making banana bread.

Intimations zadie smith review