A Study Guide for Zadie Smith's "Swing Time"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Zadie Smith's "Swing Time", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781410394033

Book preview

18

Swing Time

Zadie Smith

2016

Introduction

Zadie Smith is one of the most admired and accomplished British writers of the early twenty-first century. Anative of London, Smith was born to a Jamaican mother and English father and raised in the city's ethnically diverse Kilburn area. Her ability to adopt a variety of perspectives in her first novel, White Teeth—from white to brown to black and from Christian to Muslim, among others—and write with an incisive understanding of modern Western society led to the debut's being sensationally received. Her ensuing publications have solidified her standing among the English-speaking world's top handful of novelists in terms of critical and popular anticipation and appreciation of her works.

Swing Time (2016) is Smith's fifth novel and features extensive considerations of the nuances of race, history, and society, often through the lens of dance. The novel begins in October 2008, when the anonymous narrator—who highly resembles the author in terms of background—is laying low in London after the recent fallout from some kind of scandal. She drops by a film lecture featuring a clip from the 1936 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film Swing Time, pointing to her deep fascination with dance, in the context of black history as well as her own life. The tale that follows begins with childhood dance classes at a church on Saturdays and proceeds both to London's West End and to a village in West Africa—with the entourage of Australian pop star Aimee—among other locales, tracking the development of the narrator and also her friend Tracey, two girls trying to get what they can out of life. Swing Time was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

Author Biography

Sadie A. Smith was born in the London borough of Brent, England, on October 25, 1975, to a Jamaican psychotherapist mother and an English war veteran father who worked in advertising. She was first raised in Kilburn on a council estate, a form of public housing roughly equivalent to the projects in America. She had two younger brothers, and her father also had an older son and daughter from a previous marriage. Smith stood apart from her peers at an early age in part because of her intelligence, honed on the abundance of books in the family's house. She loved children's fantasy classics like C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), but before long she was reading Jane Austen, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and selections from her mother's radical feminist literature. Smith was writing poetry by six and short stories by nine.

For all her appreciation of literature, Smith first envisioned for herself a career as a movie actress. She adored Katharine Hepburn and was especially fond of old musicals. At age fourteen, she changed her name from Sadie to Zadie, appreciating the aura of difference it reflected. She took tap dancing lessons for a decade—but by age fifteen realized that the era of old Hollywood glamour was gone forever.

Through her teenage years, Smith favored solitude, profound literature like George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872), and black-and-white films. Her parents divorced during this time. Graduating from Hampstead Comprehensive School in 1994 and refocused on English literature, she proceeded to Kings College, Cambridge University, where a number of her literary idols—Lord Byron, William