![]() ![]() For Smith, cooped up at home with her family and confronted with the reality of filling time, writing provides a raft through stormy currents, her way of eking out a semblance of narrative during our moment of destabilizing upheavals. The six essays are crisp and vaguely personal, avoiding definitive conclusions for quieter moments of introspection and wonder. It’s the “global humbling.” Or when “global shit hit the fan.” The pandemic is transmuted into the silent disaster underwriting the anxiety coursing through her discussion of tulips, memes, and contempt.īegun at the start of lockdown in the United States and finished days after George Floyd’s murder, Intimations, Smith’s third essay collection, breezes by at under 100 pages, perfect for our roving and scattered attentions. Smith dulls the immense force of the pandemic with her sharp-edged, searching prose. She mentions lockdown, PPE shortages, leaving New York City for London. Zadie Smith does not refer to the coronavirus pandemic by name. ![]() The author’s copy of Zadie Smith, Intimations (Penguin Books) (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic) ![]()
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