Zadie Smith says making art need not address political crisis directly to carry social value, as she prepares to appear at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver on October15, per vancouversun.com.
The British novelist and essayist’s An Evening with Zadie Smith begins at 7:30pm at the Chan Centre, 6265 Crescent Rd., University of British Columbia. Tickets start at $30 at tickets.ubc.ca.
In “Art For Our Sakes,” an essay published in June in The New York Review of Books, Smith argues that in a culture increasingly shaped by machine thinking and propaganda, the human act of creating art is meaningful in itself. She described it as an encouragement for artists to believe their habit of making art is “powerful and meaningful, especially in times of crisis.”
The argument bears on the novel she is writing. Smith has called the present moment a “he’ll scape,” but the book, set during a school trip to Moscow in January 1990, does not confront it head-on. “I didn’t say it had nothing to do with it, I said it didn’t deal directly,” she says. “Indirection can be very useful, for a novelist.”
Smith, now 50, rose to prominence with her debut novel White Teeth (2000), a multigenerational portrait of multicultural London. It became an international bestseller and won the Whitbread First Novel Award, among other honours. Her work spans six novels, short fiction, plays and essay collections. Her latest novel, the historical fiction The Fraud, appeared in 2023, followed by the 2025 essay collection Dead And Alive.
The collection is divided into five sections: Eyeballing, Considering, Reconsidering, Mourning and Confessing. It ranges across art, film, literature, politics and Smith’s own life. Mourning remembers writers including Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Martin Amis and Hilary Mantel, while Confessing includes essays on ageing, writing The Fraud and her adolescence.
In one such essay, “The Fall,” Smith revisits an episode from her teens when she fell from her bedroom window, without imposing a tidy explanation. She says she wanted to explore “human willing,” adding that many political and cultural arguments are now complicated because people have stopped believing in concepts such as false consciousness, the subconscious, divided feelings and incomplete knowledge. Writing about the incident did not change her understanding of it, but reminded her that teenagers are sometimes more honest about the “maelstrom of instinct, narrative, self-deception and pure fear” that makes up most people’s personalities.
Smith says she looks at “every single person” she passes on the street, though she is unsure whether that is peculiar to writers. One thing has changed, she says: since about 2008, she is the only person in public not looking at a device, which makes it easy to observe others unnoticed.
She is equally wary of simplistic expressions of national identity. Asked whether people discover their attachment to their country when it is under threat, as Canadians have recently reflected in response to US President Donald Trump’s administration’s threats toward Canada, she distinguished between appreciating a country and proclaiming its greatness. “Fervent nationalism is the clearest sign of a country having a nervous breakdown,” she says. “When you really love a country, you don’t need to wave a flag.”
Canada, she suggests, faces a particular challenge. “Canada is presently under attack by a country having an extremely flagrant nervous breakdown,” she says. “It seems to me the challenge is not to let a drowning person pull you under.”
Despite the wider climate, Smith remains optimistic about her profession and is unsurprised that young people still want to become novelists. “No boss, sit at home all day, make your own hours, make up stories? It’s like being a kid. I wouldn’t swap it for anything in the world.” She is puzzled, however, by aspiring writers who do not read. “To me, the job of writing is mostly reading,” she says.
•Featured image: Zadie Smith/Dominique Nabokov/Handout