Where to Start with Zadie Smith: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Zadie Smith — whether to begin with White Teeth, NW, On Beauty, or Swing Time. A complete reading guide to Zadie Smith's novels and essays.
Zadie Smith (born 1975) is the most celebrated British novelist of her generation — the author whose debut White Teeth (2000), written while she was an undergraduate at Cambridge, immediately established her as one of the most significant voices in contemporary British fiction. Her novels — White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, Swing Time — trace a progression from youthful exuberance to formal experimentation to emotional depth; her essay collections (Feel Free, Changing My Mind) demonstrate an additional gift for cultural criticism that places her among the finest essayists writing in English.
Where to Start
The Debut: White Teeth (2000)
The essential first Smith — and still her most immediately enjoyable novel. The multigenerational story of the Joneses and the Iqbals in North London is Smith’s fullest account of what British multiculturalism actually looks like — not the political ideal but the lived reality, with all its comedy, its misunderstandings, its competing nostalgia (for England, for Bengal, for the 1940s), and its extraordinary human richness. The novel has a cast of dozens and a plot that sprawls across fifty years; its energy and delight in its own material never flags. The best introduction to Smith’s particular sensibility.
The Experimental Novel: NW (2012)
Smith’s most formally ambitious novel — and the one that most directly reflects the influence of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Four characters from the Caldwell estate in Willesden are rendered in radically different prose styles: Leah’s stream of consciousness, Natalie’s numbered fragments, Felix’s more conventional third-person, the final lyric sequence. The novel is about the geography of London — the way a postcode determines a life — and about the different futures available to people from the same neighbourhood. More demanding than White Teeth; more emotionally concentrated.
The Novel of Ideas: On Beauty (2005)
Smith’s most overtly Forsterian novel — a deliberate homage to E.M. Forster’s Howards End transposed to a New England university town. Two academic families (the white liberal Belseys and the Black conservative Kippses) are connected by the friendship and eventual conflict of their patriarchs, by a romantic involvement between their children, and by the university’s culture-war battles over the canon and affirmative action. Smith’s most explicitly political novel and her most sustained comedy of manners.
Swing Time (2016)
Smith’s most emotionally rich novel — and the most formally accomplished of her later work. The unnamed narrator’s friendship with Tracey (who is a better dancer, whose life takes a worse trajectory), her career as an assistant to the pop star Aimee, and her relationship with her politically radical mother are Smith’s most sustained investigation of race, class, and ambition. The novel is less exuberant than White Teeth and more melancholy; it is also the most fully felt. The best of her mature work.
The Autograph Man (2002)
Smith’s second novel — and the one most frequently cited as her weakest, though it has pleasures that comparison to White Teeth obscures. Alex-Li Tandem, a Jewish Chinese North Londoner who trades in celebrity autographs, is Smith’s most explicitly male protagonist and her most Jewishly engaged. The novel is less ambitious and less fully realised than its predecessor; it is also very funny in places and contains Smith’s most direct engagement with the male fantasy of the cool girl. Worth reading after the major novels.
Reading Zadie Smith
Smith is both a novelist and a significant essayist — her collections Changing My Mind and Feel Free are among the best collections of cultural criticism in contemporary English. Readers who enjoy her fiction will find the essays an essential companion, particularly her long pieces on writers (Kafka, Forster, David Foster Wallace) and on film (she is one of the finest film critics writing). The essays demonstrate the range and seriousness of her intellectual interests, which are present in the novels but often subordinated to character and story.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Zadie Smith?
White Teeth (2000) is the best starting point — the debut novel that immediately established Smith as one of the most significant British novelists of her generation: a sprawling, funny, multi-generational account of two North London families (the Joneses and the Iqbals, whose friendship began in the Second World War) and the multicultural Britain they inhabit. It is Smith's most exuberant and most immediately pleasurable novel, written when she was in her mid-twenties, and it demonstrates her gifts — her ear for dialogue, her delight in character, her ability to hold many plotlines simultaneously — at their most energetic.
What is White Teeth about?
White Teeth (2000) follows the intersecting families of Archie Jones (white, English, working-class) and Samad Iqbal (Bengali, Muslim, intellectual) from their chance wartime meeting in Bulgaria through fifty years of North London life, to the third generation — Archie's biracial daughter Irie and Samad's twin sons Magid and Millat — in the 1990s. The novel is simultaneously a comedy about immigrant Britain, a meditation on the relationship between history and identity, and a social novel about the North London multicultural world that Smith grew up in. Smith's debut remains one of the most celebrated British novels of the past quarter century.
What is NW about?
NW (2012) is Smith's most formally experimental novel — a portrait of four characters who grew up on the Caldwell estate in Willesden, Northwest London, and whose adult lives demonstrate the different trajectories that are available to people from the same neighbourhood. Leah Hanwell, Natalie Blake (née Keisha), Felix Cooper, and Nathan Bogle are rendered in four formally distinct sections — stream of consciousness, numbered fragments, conventional narrative, a final darkly comic sequence. The novel is Smith's most direct engagement with London's economic geography and its racial and class implications.
What is Swing Time about?
Swing Time (2016) follows an unnamed narrator who grows up in a North London council estate, becomes the assistant to a global pop star (clearly modeled on Madonna), and traces her friendship with Tracey, a more gifted dancer whose life takes a very different trajectory. The novel is organised around dance — Fred Astaire, Michael Jackson, the narrator's girlhood dance classes — and is Smith's most direct engagement with the experience of racial identity in a world structured around whiteness. More formally conventional than NW; her most emotionally nuanced novel.
