Zadie Smith

From Justin Bieber to Martin Buber, Zadie Smith’s Essays Showcase Her Exuberance and Range

By AMANDA FORTINI FEB. 21, 2018

Zadie Smith

FEEL FREE
Essays
By Zadie Smith
452 pp. Penguin Press. $28.

As a teenager, Zadie Smith discovered Hanif Kureishi’s novel “The Buddha of Suburbia” and felt her world crack open. Kureishi, who is British-Pakistani, made his narrator and protagonist, Karim, mixed race as well. Smith, the child of a black Jamaica-born mother and a white British father, wasn’t used to seeing biracial characters in fiction. “Practically the only star I had to steer by was that old, worn-out, paper-thin character the ‘tragic mulatto,’” she writes in her latest collection of essays, “Feel Free,” “whom I found in bad novels and worse movies.” But Karim wasn’t tragic, nor was he an idealized, anodyne role model. He was, in Smith’s words, “pushy, wild, charismatic, street-smart, impudent, often hilarious.”


Amanda Fortini is a writer and visiting lecturer at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.