Swing Time
ZADIE SMITH
Years ago, I lived with a trainee psychoanalyst. When he showed me the reading list for his first term’s seminars, I was surprised to see that topping it wasn’t The Interpretation of Dreams or Totem and Taboo, but L.P. Hartley’s The Go- Between. It was there to introduce them to Freud’s firmest conviction – that childhood is the furnace in which we’re forged, and nothing that happens afterwards will ever make as much of an impact. Zadie Smith’s (pictured) new novel starts from the same point, showing how flat and featureless our remaining decades can look when set against the first one.
We meet Swing Time’s narrator (who’s never named) as a seven-year-old in Eighties’ Willesden, arriving at her first ballet lesson. Her Jamaican-born mother, ahead of her time in espadrilles and with a book on gender studies under her arm, can’t see the point, but the little girl is bewitched – not least by classmate Tracey, who has a face “like a darker Shirley Temple” and a precocious talent.
