Moving between Politics and Aesthetics in Zadie Smith’s Shorter Forms

Zadie Smith’s shorter forms – the short story and the essay – have received much less critical attention than her five novels. As an approach to these shorter forms and, specifically, to Smith’s interest in politics and aesthetics, I consider, in various ways, the notion of ‘moving between’. In the introductory section, I discuss Smith’s comments on the characteristics of the two forms, namely the association of the short story with feeling and the essay with the intellectual or analytic, and Smith’s repeated claim that she fails in both forms. In each of the following two sections, a short story and an essay are paired. The context is the period from 2016 to 2018 in the USA and the UK. In the first pairing, the essay, ‘Getting In and Out’ (2017), and the story, ‘Now More Than Ever’ (2018), the focus is the fevered debate around identity politics and political correctness, and a punitive use of social media. The second pairing, ‘Fences: A Brexit Diary (2016) and the story, ‘The Lazy River’, is, self-evidently, about Brexit. In these texts, we see how a sense of aesthetic possibility and intellectual freedom confronts a prescriptive politics; how Smith draws the reader’s attention to problems of political divisiveness in her use of pronouns, figures of speech, and catchphrases; and how, sometimes, her aesthetic response can sit awkwardly alongside her political principles. In the range, interest, and provocativeness of Smith’s short stories and essays, the reader is led to question her claims of incompetence.