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Swing Time
Mar. 14th, 2024 12:21 pmMy experiences of reading Zadie Smith have thus far been very hit (On Beauty) and miss (White Teeth) - and Swing Time proved to be both within one book!
Initially, I was engaged by the story, I liked the (unnamed, though it took me about a third of the book to realise this) protagonist, and I found myself intrigued as to where it was all eventually going.
The continual use of comma splices really annoyed me - I was recently told, as an editor. that it's something I should potentially ignore as part of the author's unique 'voice' - but I'm not sure I ever could...
And it got very confusing in places. At one point, the protagonist is telling her boss an anecdote and the boss says, "The timeline's very confusing," which is how I felt about the book once the main story really got going. It bounced back and forth a lot without ever explaining how much time had passed in either of the narratives. And there were wild inconsistencies. As a reader, I'm always calculating - if this happened at this point, then this character must have been this old, etc, etc. But, according to the limited number of specific references points given, one of the main characters had her second child at the age of 34, 38 and 42 - which is just annoying, and very easily avoided with a continuity editor...
Still, the story kept me interested most of the time (though it did lose me at a couple of points), there was a lot of fascinating cultural and societal detail I found enlightening, and one of the themes throughout was old-time musicals, which I appreciated, as I'm very familiar with most of them.
So, I didn't have any trouble finishing this one, but it certainly didn't grab me like On Beauty and I don't think I'll be going out of my way to seek out Zadie Smith in the future.
Initially, I was engaged by the story, I liked the (unnamed, though it took me about a third of the book to realise this) protagonist, and I found myself intrigued as to where it was all eventually going.
The continual use of comma splices really annoyed me - I was recently told, as an editor. that it's something I should potentially ignore as part of the author's unique 'voice' - but I'm not sure I ever could...
And it got very confusing in places. At one point, the protagonist is telling her boss an anecdote and the boss says, "The timeline's very confusing," which is how I felt about the book once the main story really got going. It bounced back and forth a lot without ever explaining how much time had passed in either of the narratives. And there were wild inconsistencies. As a reader, I'm always calculating - if this happened at this point, then this character must have been this old, etc, etc. But, according to the limited number of specific references points given, one of the main characters had her second child at the age of 34, 38 and 42 - which is just annoying, and very easily avoided with a continuity editor...
Still, the story kept me interested most of the time (though it did lose me at a couple of points), there was a lot of fascinating cultural and societal detail I found enlightening, and one of the themes throughout was old-time musicals, which I appreciated, as I'm very familiar with most of them.
So, I didn't have any trouble finishing this one, but it certainly didn't grab me like On Beauty and I don't think I'll be going out of my way to seek out Zadie Smith in the future.
