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best of British - Zadie Smith
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In One Beauty Zadie Smith deposits an English family onto the North East coast of America and expertly prods and picks at the similarities in culture, as well as the differences as the academic Belsey and Kipps families intertwine in often less than academic ways. The book, following on her excellent debut White Teeth was hilarious, cynical, touching, perceptive and incisive, characteristics which have all become something of a trademark of Smith’s. Her ability to cross the trans-Atlantic cultural gap have led to her scribing for, amongst others, The New York Times and The New Yorker making her helpfully relevant to culture in NYC as well as British and slapping her bang in the middle of my field.
With further happy happenstance, she has a new collection of essays out, in book form, drawn from these sources and others called Speaking In Tongues in which she turns her eye and her pen towards subjects ranching from Barack Obama and the possibility of change and hope, to whether it is possible to over-dress for the Oscars, Katherine Hepburn (though not together. I don’t think anyone ever accused Katherine Hepburn have inappropriately for the Oscars, though I could very well be wrong) to feminism and British comedy (again, those are separate items, not one, I believe, though, again, I could be mistaken).
Pretty much everything Zadie Smith turns her pen to turns to gold (but in an exciting, creative, productive way, not a disastrous Midas type way), so this is definitely worth checking out.
