Then, she walks on, “maintaining a six-foot distance, whether to conform with the new regulations or to avoid Beck biting me in some vulnerable spot I couldn’t tell.” … We’ll get through this, all of us, together.” It’s a prayer, of course, and a plea for connection - which Smith curtly acknowledges. “There is an ideal, rent-controlled city dweller who appears to experience no self-pity, who knows exactly how long to talk to someone in the street, who creates community without overly sentimentalizing the concept - or ever saying aloud the word ‘community,’” she introduces one particular neighbor, “and who always picks up after their dog, even if it’s physically painful to do so.”īut the admiring portrait grows more complex when the actual, nonidealized woman announces: “Thing is, we’re a community, and we got each other’s back. These problems center the pastiche essay “Screen Grabs,” a series of impressions of Smith’s Manhattan neighborhood, Greenwich Village. I’m not talking about politics (although that too), but rather how we interact with the people with whom we share the world. Such issues continue to infuse the present, although their salience is complicated by the ways the virus has eroded collective trust. She is a spectacular essayist - even better, I’d say, than as a novelist - who has written searchingly about race and culture, identity and place and family. Smith is aware of such criticism, yet even as she grapples with it she maintains the interiority that makes essays distinct. (Think of Frieda Hughes’ “ Forty-Five,” 45 poems published around her 45th birthday, or Heidi Julavits’ mash-up diary “ The Folded Clock.”) The essential form of this moment, it appears, is the essay, which has proliferated like a contagion of its own. There are certain books that take their form from circumstance: the manner - or even the moment - in which they were composed.

But really, her subject is the strange, dislocated present we occupy. Smith is referring in part to what she describes (invoking herself in the third person) as “the social protections of her youth, which had not seemed to her dreams, but rather mundane realities - universal health care, free university education, decent public housing - all now recast as revolutionary concepts” in America, where the British-born author lives part of the year. “What modest dreamers we have become,” Zadie Smith writes midway through her new book, “ Intimations,” which gathers six short essays that seek to reckon with the experience of pandemic life. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.

Zadie smith intimations six essays