Zadie Smith has nothing to say She is a master of self-regarding equivocation | Dead and Alive by…

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Zadie Smith has nothing to say She is a master of self-regarding equivocation

Spare us another meandering think piece. Credit: David Levenson / Getty Images

Spare us another meandering think piece. Credit: David Levenson / Getty Images

Twenty years ago this year, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt published his influential book On Bullshit. According to Frankfurt, the bullshitter, a well-known social menace, is an individual who, unlike the liar, holds forth with complete indifference as to whether he is speaking truly or falsely. He just speaks: in a manner recklessly detached from the facts. As other philosophers quickly noticed, however, bullshit is a diverse category, one with many prototypes. In his own contribution to the blossoming field of bullshit studies, the Oxford philosopher G.A. Cohen suggested that much 20th-century French critical theory should be thought of as a different species of bullshit in virtue of its “unclarifiable unclarity”. David Graeber famously speculated that, within the modern economy, entire professions and activities constituted a kind of “bullshit”. If these manifestations of bullshit have anything in common it is perhaps that in each some clearly functional ideal — truthful communication, clear writing, meaningful employment — is flagrantly undermined, while the appearance that it isn’t is deceptively sustained.

Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith review – essays for an age of anxiety

Accepting a literary prize in Ohio last year, the novelist Zadie Smith described “feeling somewhat alienated from myself, experiencing myself as a posthumous entity”. Smith is only 50, but there is indeed something of the afterlife about the material gathered in her new book, which bundles various odds and ends from the past nine years: speeches, opinion pieces, criticism and eulogies for departed literary heroes – Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel.

In Some Notes on Mediated Time – one of three completely new essays in the collection – Smith recalls how the “dreamy, slo-mo world” of her 1980s childhood gave way, within a generation, to the “anxious, permanent now” of social media. If you lived through that transition, you don’t have to be very old to feel ancient. When this estrangement is compounded by the ordinary anxieties of ageing, cultural commentary becomes inflected with self-pity. Smith’s identification with the protagonist of Todd Field’s Tár, a once revered conductor who finds herself shunned by the younger cohort, takes on existential proportions: “Our backs hurt, the kids don’t like Bach any more – and the seas are rising!”

Zadie Smith and Anne Enright: the art of paying attention

“When you review an exhibition of paintings, you don’t compose a painting about it. When you review a film you don’t make a film about it… But when you review a prose-narrative, then you write a prose-narrative about that prose-narrative,” Martin Amis once said. He was pointing out a drawback of book reviewing – the inevitability of envy on the part of the reviewer – but we can choose to take it as an invitation, too. In two new essay collections by Zadie Smith and Anne Enright, some of the most thrilling moments arise when attention is focused on another writer.

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