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Zadie Smith Talks British Upbringing, Inspirations

Zadie Smith was born in Brent and, at various points in her upbringing, explored her passions for tap dancing, musical theatre and jazz singing, before focusing on literature. She went on to study English at King’s College, Cambridge. She is married to the writer Nick Laird and is a Professor of Fiction at New York University.

In this exclusive interview for Foyles, Zadie talks about James Joyce as the ultimate realist, how Dickens’ portrait of London was the first she recognized as her own city and the advantage of being one writer amongst thousands in New York.

The London you portray is less of a cultural melting pot and more of an agglomeration of largely discrete communities. Why do you think so many districts are becoming insular and isolated now?

Belief in the state – and in the very idea of communal responsibilities – has evaporated. Partly this is an ideological shift and partly a necessary post-rationalization after the recent near-collapse of the financial system. Simply put, the rich have got richer and the poor, poorer. But you really didn’t need to ask a novelist to get the answer to that, did you? Even the dogs in the street know that….

NW features some ingenious sleights of typography and structure. Do these more experimental aspects come from your admiration of writers like David Foster Wallace and George Saunders?

Not really – neither of them do much with typography, or structure actually; their innovations are more about tone. Anyway, I think we should be a bit wary of labelling certain techniques ‘experimental’ as if it’s just a set of tools one picks up to lend whatever you’re writing a trace of hipster cool… it’s like those superstores of ‘alternative’ hipster taste; American Outfitters and so on… I hate that idea. Everything I do is an attempt to get close to the real, as I experience it, and the closer you get to the reality of experience the more bizarre it SHOULD look on the page and sound in the mouth because our real experience doesn’t come packaged in a neat three act structure. For me, Joyce is the ultimate realist because he is trying to convey how experience really feels. And he found it to be so idiosyncratic he needed to invent a new language for it. All I was trying to do in NW was tell fewer lies then last time, and it came out the way it came out.

In ‘Speaking in Tongues’ an essay included in Changing My Mind, you wrote about the way that your working-class voice has gradually been supplanted by that of your life at Cambridge and as part of the literary milieu. Did the writing of NW allow you to rediscover some part of you that had been suppressed?

In that essay I was trying to describe some of the alienating side effects a ‘good’ education can bring to a working class child. But going to Cambridge didn’t make my very large family disappear, or all my friends, or the twenty years of my past. It’s all still here and I’m still a part of it, even if I get the piss taken out of me sometimes for my round vowels. It was obviously a pleasure to return to the old neighbourhood…

Read more: Foyles

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