British Writer Zadie Smith's "Swing Time" Another Brilliant Novel from this Talented Writer

Zadie Smith (b Britain 1975) is an accomplished writer with numerous honors.  She received the Whitbread 1st Novel Award for "White Teeth" ('00) and her novel "On Beauty" earned an Orange Prize.  Smith's latest novel "Swing Time" is another literary achievement that strives to strike a balance between serious social issues: race, class along with astute social parodies.  This is a craftily written contemporary novel that swings for the fences but doesn't always score.  The nameless, bi-racial narrator shares the millenials' search for a substantive life, yet she's fairly self-consumed.  "We felt we had our place in time." Smith uses music & dance as a metronome for racial, economic, social & power divides.  The hierachy pits blacks at the bottom.  "Sometimes at the top, white man, Jew, Arab, Chinese, Japanese - depend.  But your people {Black} at the bottom - always they lose."  Smith observes "Tribes stick together - it even goes by shade."  The novel leads with a heavy foot regarding power struggles.  "Power preys on weakness, local, racial, tribal, royal, national, global, economic - on all kinds of weaknesses. "  People are placed into categories & a pecking order.  The narrators' black mother felt what mattered was culture & color.  Her white father defined by their labor.  There's striations of esteem related to skin tone; lighter skinned blacks being considered superior to darker skinned.  "Tribes stick together - it even goes by shade.  Everybody goes with their own is the point and it's natural."  Musical styles are rigidly divided: black music, white music.  The narrator ponders if there exists a world where the two combine.  She believes dancers are the best type of people.  "Their bodies tell them what to do."  The novel does a scorching parody of Madonna a.k.a. "Aimee."  She's an int'l (white) rock star who drops in on Africa trolling money behind and leaving with her a young lover & infant.  Smith returns to dance & time, time & again. These themes lead the rhythm of the book.  "A great dancer is eternal, has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world so that any dancer in any age may recognize him."  Smith tips her top hat to Astaire, Michael Jackson & Nijinsky.  Smith loves the ephemeral qualities dancers posses & the absence of ties to any one people.  Our narrator loved watching older dance movies like  "Swing Time" with Fred & Ginger.  These movies are distractions from one's own problems.   Zadie Smith's "Swing Time" is a charming & diverting novel which moonwalks towards preachiness.  During London's Bohemian 60's, "At that time, there was no black, there was no white - Nothing so banal.  We were brothers, in art, in love."