Esther Reichek reviews Zadie Smith's Intimations for The 1701 Project, a venture led by The Yale Historical Review.

1. REVIEW
by Esther Reichek, BC ‘23
one of which Smith takes from Stoic emperor Marcus
Aurelius’Meditations,and the foreword,where she war-
ds off associations with “historical, analytical, political,
as well as comprehensive accounts.” So what is Inti-
mations? (The Wordsworthian title announces Smith’s
high seriousness; the book’s format seems to belie it.)
And what is the value of reading it at this moment?
Intimations is eminently topical. Smith presents
clear analysis, if not original insights, in the essay
“American Exception” (first published in The New
Yorker) about the economic and racial disparities that
correlate to COVID-19 deaths and the American
dream of buying an escape from mortality. In the fi-
nal part of “Screengrabs,” “Postscript: Contempt as
a Virus,” Smith responds directly to the murder of
George Floyd. Racism is the virus that Smith iden-
tifies, but white people act as if the virus is Blackness
itself. Rhetorically, Smith may be strongest here, when
she asks: “Why else would the carriers of this [racist]
virus work so hard – even now, even in the bluest
states in America – to ensure their children do not go
to school with the children of these people whose lives
supposedly matter?” Smith calls for widespread soli-
darity among the “plague class” as the only antidote
to the virus, rather than empty displays of essentialist
understanding and social media “activism.”
In fact, Intimations feels so on-the-nose that I al-
most wish Smith had waited and published it at the
end of summer, when perhaps she would have accumu-
lated other pieces about more recent events: the Black
Lives Matter protests, calls to defund the police, etc. I
also wonder what she would have said about the “Open
Letter” published in Harper’s in early July. The “Letter”
(signed by many illustrious intellectuals, not including
Smith) called for freedom of thought and speech, as
well as for the end of censorship on all sides of the po-
litical spectrum; it drew ire for a short week because of
controversies surrounding some of its signatories and
its vague assertions, and then all went quiet.
Journalist Thomas Chatterton Williams (who,
as it turned out, was one of the writers who drafted
and circulated the “Letter”) celebrated Smith’s refusal
to conform or capitulate in a review of Smith’s 2018
essay collection, Feel Free in the London Review of
Books. But there’s a difference between the freedom
Smith delights in and the freedom that the “Letter”
hen I first opened Zadie Smith’s Intimations: Six Essays
(Penguin, 112 pp., $10.95, July 2020), I felt disappointed.
Not by the length – barely 100 pages of text – but by the
dimensions.Each page is only 5x7 inches,a size I associate more with
self-help books than collections from such a sharp and subtle mind
as Smith’s.My trepidation grew as I read the philosophical epigraphs,
W
YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW
TIMELINESS AND TIMELESSNESS
IN ZADIE SMITH’S INTIMATIONS

2. promotes. Freedom for Smith involves shape-shifting.
Smith can occupy the viewpoint of a character who is
a Black woman like herself, but she can also metamor-
phose into figures whose cultural backgrounds differ
from hers completely.
What gives Smith the license to appropriate in
this way? Smith herself isn’t sure, but she is keen to
explore, which she’s done in pieces such as “In Defense
of Fiction”(published in the New York Review of Books).
There, she wrestles with the colonial implications of
“containing” other stories, which makes her uneasy,
and the pursuit of freedom, which she cherishes. Smith
seems to desire the liberalism that appears to have ins-
pired the Harper’s “Letter,”but she consistently situates
liberalism in the terrain of a genuinely multicultural
working class. Smith’s writing is grounded in specifics
that acknowledge the nuances of different backgrounds
while simultaneously championing humanism: sim-
ply put, Smith loves people. The “Letter,” on the hand,
through its equating of hate speech on the right with
pushes for political correctness on the left, turns free-
dom into a concern for an entitled elite and no one else.
Smith’s love of people is on full display throughout
Intimations. She sketches vivid vignettes of the specific
characters who inhabit her orbit,from the NYU IT guy
to an auntie she runs into at a bus stop. Smith exer-
cises awareness of her privilege – from her class to her
flexible work schedule to her ability to leave New York
as coronavirus spreads – and simultaneously elaborates
the elemental pain and loneliness brought on by the
quarantine period. In “Suffering Like Mel Gibson,”
Smith pushes towards a more universal humanism: eve-
ryone, no matter their privilege, can suffer.“Suffering is
not relative;” writes Smith “it is absolute.” The title of
the essay is inspired by a meme made out of a picture
of Mel Gibson in a director’s chair looking very chill as
he talks to Jesus Christ, blood-soaked in his crown of
thorns. (My own take is that Jesus is playing Gibson’s
selfless therapist.) Gibson spews out his problems even
though his condition is so much obviously better than
Jesus’s; Jesus, in turn, suspended on the cross,“no doubt
looked about him and wondered whether his agonies,
when all was said and done, were relatively speaking in
fact better than those of the thieves and beggars to his
left and right.”
Smith has a wicked sense of humor, yet the essays
in Intimations employ restraint more often than exube-
rance. Her characteristic mix of high and low culture
has simmered down; Smith paints herself as an eve-
rywoman, exceptionally clever but undeniably low-key.
There is still much, though, that sparkles. In the last,
loveliest section of Intimations, Smith assembles a list
of “Debts and Lessons.” The lists under each person’s
name could easily have become saccharine and trite.
They did not. The section constitutes a direct response
to the first part of Aurelius’Meditations,to which Smith
turned for guidance during the early months.
The original title of Aurelius’ text translates (from
the Greek the Roman emperor wrote in) to “Things
to Oneself,” a modest title that nevertheless contains
a contradiction. The act of writing itself makes public
one’s thoughts. What does it mean to write a thing to
oneself? Hasn’t the public nature of the written word
already transformed the original thought? The diarist
may be as illegible as she likes; she understands the
strange implications and the history that roils under
her accounts of daily life. But the essayist? The essayist
must make herself legible to the public; she must clarify
herself.The lessons, though, which Smith gleaned from
Aurelius, suggest that in Intimations she has allowed
her intimate thoughts to be heard.Aurelius,in any case,
did not expect his collection of Stoic sayings to be pos-
thumously published; Smith differentiates herself from
him by virtue of her deliberate decision to publish the
collection. Yet Intimations preserves the intimacy of
Meditations. The final character Smith recognizes is
“Contingency,” which has given her a life in which her
“physical and moral cowardice have never really been
tested, until now.”
“Until now.”Smith’s final words are a reminder that
“now” continues. Of course, Smith is referring to our
current strange reality, but I like to think that “now” for
such a collection as Intimations extends beyond this mo-
ment to the next and the next, far exceeding the slen-
derness of the present moment – and of the volume it-
self.The reflections are at once timely and timeless.
ZADIE SMITH'S INTIMATIONS
“Smith's love of
people is on
full display in
Intimations.”