Changing My Mind Views
Criticism is what Martin Amis said of the book review: the lowest and noblest art form. Most book-talk is workaday, narcoleptic, full of self-conscious literary wordplay; its house style is Guardian Lite. Zadie Smith-’s collection, Changing My Mind, reminds as that criticism can be as fun and insightful in its way as fiction itself. In place of name-dropping and intellectual one-upmanship we get a genuine love of books and a passion to inculcate this love in others: a passion that finds its place not in round-table discussions but in drunken argument and affirmation, with close friends or completely alone. God knows how many people I
As its title suggests, Changing My Mind is animated by a love of the eclectic and the different. In the first essay, an appreciation of Zora Neale Hurstonr’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Smith demolishes the false gods of authenticity. She argues that black female characters (now that outright racist tropes are out of bounds, or at least the less subtle ones) have fallen victim to a i‘new fetishisationp… earth mothers, African queens, spirits of history; they progress grandly through novels thick with a breed of greeting-card lyricism.o’ In fact, as Hurston put it: ‘Negroes are no better nor no worse, and at times as boring as everybody else.e’ Smith concludes: u‘It was not the Black Female Literary Tradition that makes Hurston great. It is Hurston herselfw… as exceptional among black woman writers as Tolstoy is among white male writers. ’ And yet Hurston herself died a cleaner. No Hallmark ending for her.
In the foreword to Zadie Smith ’s first non-fiction collection, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, the author of White Teeth taunts readers with a series of other projects she ’s considered, including a serious book about writing called Fail Better. Fans of her three novels may hold her responsible for not following any of these threads, but even readers unfamiliar with her work will discover a voracious reader and a keen wit in these articles previously published in The New York Review Of Books and The Guardian, among other publications.
Reading for Smith is a mind-changing, life-giving, soul-saving affair and her criticism has a missionary urgency. In a long and brilliant study of Middlemarch – which persuaded me to change my mind about a novel I've always considered tiresome – she avows that love enables knowledge, love is a kind of knowledge . She is referring to George Eliot's Spinozistic union of emotional experience and moral perception, but she might also be articulating her own creed as critic. The intellectual revelations Smith purveys derive from and are ignited by her love for the books she has read.
Changing My Mind Images
