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69
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
46/100Critics
67/100Scholars
94/100Author:
Zadie Smith
Publisher:
Penguin Books
Date:
July 28, 2020
The author of White Teeth and Grand Union offers timely meditations on life during the covid-19 pandemic, considering subjects from the creative process to the characters who populate her New York neighborhood to racism in the United States.
What The Reviewers Say
A novelist at heart, Smith writes essays that scarcely abide by the current understanding of the form. She doesn’t buttonhole her reader with fervent arguments and rarely brandishes a suitable object for blame. And while one of the pieces in Intimations concerns suffering, Smith seems allergic to the notion of testifying to her own in any detail. She’s ambivalent, sometimes rueful, often self-deprecating. Her first inclination is to laugh at herself.
I think this collection of little pieces by Zadie Smith will endure as a beautiful thing. Although it’s born out of the pandemic and the lockdown, it feels like a doorway into a new space for thought.
... ultra-timely essays (several written in the past few momentous months), showcases her trademark levelheadedness.
Smith’s slim volume is a balm during an anxious year. We have learned the meaning of essential, and Smith’s prose is correspondingly stripped down. Clear. Precise. Orderly. Though her accomplishment is making her point plain without being obvious, the literary equivalent of the Norman Rockwell painting The Problem We All Live With, which depicts 6-year-old Ruby Bridges being escorted to school by federal marshals. You miss the racist graffiti scrawled on the wall behind her on first glance, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it. No, I won’t spoil Smith’s brilliance for you, but it’s right there in the first piece, Peonies.
