And like so many of these “better” best friends, Tracey goes wrong somewhere but never loses her allure. Tracey is that volatile friend who haunts so many novels of female friendship (including Smith’s own “NW”) - gifted and deeply flawed and always so much more herself, so much surer of what she is, than the woman telling the story. The story was the price you paid for the rhythm.” They take classes they write stories (“In several … African men ‘lurked in the shadows’ with iron bars to break the knees of lily-white dancers”) they videotape risqué routines that will come back to haunt them, and they love movies such as “Swing Time,” whose plots “were only roads leading to the dance. The narrator can sing, but Tracey can dance - and dancing is what both girls love most. After a tease that tells us of drama to come, the story proper begins with the narrator as a little girl, daughter of a Jamaican mother and English father, enthralled by Tracey, another little mixed-race girl in her council housing neighborhood.

“Swing Time” is a novel in search of balance - between genders, races and the haves and the have-nots of beauty, talent, status and wealth. The two best people in “Swing Time,” Zadie Smith’s new novel, are real: English poet James Fenton and his partner, black American writer Darryl Pinckney, who give the book’s unnamed narrator respite when she desperately needs it: “Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either.” Theirs is in many ways the ideal state that the narrator longs for and the arc of her story bends toward.

Zadie smith swing time review