{"id":7008,"date":"2018-01-15T07:37:08","date_gmt":"2018-01-15T12:37:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7008"},"modified":"2018-01-15T07:37:08","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T12:37:08","slug":"swing-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7008","title":{"rendered":"****Swing Time"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Swing

photo: cavalier 92, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

By Zadie Smith \u2013 Yes, I do read good books that are not crime fiction, and this is one of them! The term \u201cfrenemies\u201d could have been coined to describe the long relationship between the book\u2019s unnamed first-person narrator and Tracey, drawn together by being the only mixed-race children in a dance class. They meet, play, pirouette, and study in council housing in North London.Tracey is the talented one, accepted into a selective performing arts program, her future seemingly assured.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnnamed, unsure, neither black nor white, the narrator is fittingly indistinct in this brilliant novel about the illusions of identity,\u201d said Annalisa Quinn<\/a> in an NPR review. The story swings back and forth between present-day events and flashbacks about the girls\u2019 childhood, their growing up, and their sporadic encounters over the years. Later the narrator sees her in minor roles in classic musicals\u2014Guys and Dolls, Show Boat, <\/em>ironically\u2014before her career fades from view.<\/p>\n

The dance theme is present throughout, a universal uniting characters through time and across cultures: \u201ca great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him. Picasso would be incomprehensible to Rembrandt, but Nijinsky would understand Michael Jackson.\u201d Late in the book, dance even becomes a weapon.<\/p>\n

The narrator, meanwhile, has landed what seems like a plum job: assistant to Australian pop star Aimee. Aimee and her team divide their time between London and New York. Aimee\u2019s peripatetic lifestyle, kids and nannies in tow, means perpetual rootlessness for the narrator, a disconnect not just from her past\u2014her childhood friend, her parents\u2014but also from a future of her own.<\/p>\n

Aimee gets the notion to establish a girls\u2019 school in rural West Africa, and some of the novel\u2019s most heartfelt passages involve the narrator\u2019s yearning to connect with the Africans and the disconnect between the rich pop star and her entourage and the people she wants to help. Aimee\u2019s motives are genuinely kindly, but implementing them on the ground is far more complicated than she imagines.<\/p>\n

The narrator certainly is a perceptive observer, but will she grab hold of life and learn to dance to her own tune?
\n<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Zadie Smith \u2013 Yes, I do read good books that are not crime fiction, and this is one of them! The term \u201cfrenemies\u201d could have been coined to describe the long relationship between the book\u2019s unnamed first-person narrator and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[40,126,359],"tags":[433,864,333,1212,1211],"class_list":["post-7008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reading-2","category-review","tag-africa","tag-coming-of-age","tag-london","tag-swing-time","tag-zadie-smith"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1P2","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7008"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7010,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7008\/revisions\/7010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}