books

To open Feel Free is to be admitted, for four hundred or so pages, into the company of a mind that refuses to stand still. Zadie Smith's second essay collection, published in 2018 and assembled from pieces written during the Obama years, gathers thirty-one essays across five sections - In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free - that move from Brexit to Justin Bieber, from Joni Mitchell to Italian painting, from Key and Peele to the sex lives of insects, without ever feeling like a grab-bag. The through-line is Smith herself: frank, self-ironic, occasionally dizzied by her own place among the works she's considering, and almost always better company than one had any right to expect.

The strongest work sits in the middle of the book. The Joni Mitchell piece, "Some Notes on Attunement," is the collection's centre of gravity - an essay on the mystery of suddenly loving art one used to find unbearable, which is less a review than a small philosophical treatise on taste itself. The extended Harper's book reviews are, in their quieter way, just as fine. Smith on Thomas Bernhard, on Geoff Dyer, on Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia - these are pieces where the constraint of a subject seems to free her up rather than hem her in, and where her sentences acquire the off-hand precision that has always been her signature. The essay on finding a discarded book of Italian painting outside her apartment and spiralling into a meditation on what it is like to be a corpse is, frankly, extraordinary.

Not everything lands. The political writing - the Brexit diary in particular - can feel more like intelligent op-ed than essay, the arguments hovering somewhere you could already reach on your own by reading the weekend papers. There is a class register to the book that will strike some as dinner-party cosmopolitanism: the casual references to Italian piazzas, the art-critic friends, the inaugural Philip Roth Lecture. The absence of publication dates on the individual pieces is genuinely annoying; you often have to reconstruct the year from internal evidence. And for a book titled Feel Free, the "I" on the page is surprisingly cagey - less liberated than carefully arranged.

But the cumulative effect is disarming. The collection's five-part structure moves steadily inward, from citizenship through culture through reading to, finally, a section in which Smith lets herself simply think aloud, and the architecture does real work. What binds the whole is the voice - urgent, curious, embarrassed by its own enthusiasms, alert to the pleasures and limits of its own position. The prose is generous without being soft, and the criticism is of the rare kind that deepens a mystery rather than tidying it away.

Feel Free is not perfect, and it is not meant to be. It is the sound of a first-rate novelist thinking in real time, and on that count it is hard to imagine a better companion volume for the decade it captures.