< Zadie Smith >

driving miss zadie

By Wendy Cavenett

It’s a warm autumn morning and the soon-to-be demolished Sebel of Sydney is teeming with departing guests. Renowned as the city’s celebrity stop-off, it’s only natural that Zadie Smith, a literary star and nascent wild child, is holed up here, albeit, as I discover, unwillingly.
There’s no time for sightseeing, no scheduled R&R. In fact, Smith is tied to the momentous hoo-ha that continues to surround her debut novel, White Teeth. Not that she expected it, but when Salman Rushdie left a personal congratulatory message on her answering machine, she must have realised her life was changing. Now released in eight countries, it seems White Teeth has assumed a life far greater than the author could have ever imagined.

If she had a choice right now, she’d probably catch the next plane back to the UK. Instead, she remains seated, eyes downcast, irritated, tired and indifferent. In such a state it would be easy to misjudge her. Her monotone voice often drifts quietly away and it’s only when we stop discussing the book that she shows moments of what I imagine to be her true self; a wickedly funny, sharply intelligent 20-something Brit who detests life’s pretenders and lavishes praise upon controversial US rap artist Eminem.

“I’ve heard all the questions before,” she says. It’s unfortunate I tell her, but we should discuss her book.

“I think I can write so that’s one of the reasons why White Teeth is successful,” she says answering no question in particular. “I’m very serious about what I do and hopefully that translates somehow onto the page. It’s a funny book. People like to read funny things, and when you’re working well I suppose you happen to fall in line with some kind of Zeitgeist which doesn’t happen very often in a writer’s career. It’s a mixed blessing but there it is.”

The daughter of a Jamaican mother and an English father, Smith was born in England in 1975. She grew up in Willesden, read English at King’s College, Cambridge, returned to her neighbourhood and now lives in her own place thanks to a reported $625,000 two-book publishing deal with Penguin.

“I don’t give a fuck about the fact that you can’t get married or you don’t know whether to have children or not,” she says, “I just don’t care about lifestyle journalism crap, but I do like to see people who get up and show a skill, because it is a skill if you do it properly. That’s the kind of writing I’m interested in. People who can show me why they’re writers.

“I recently read Lolita for like the 13th time and thought that was still one of the greatest books of the last century. Nabokov was just a genius. I can’t even take it apart to understand why it’s so good. It’s just a truly great, magnificent book, partly because it makes you empathise with this paedophile basically, and it’s not there to make you feel good.

“It’s quite important to remember that fiction isn’t there to make you feel good about yourself all the time. That’s not actually the purpose of fiction, that’s the purpose of lifestyle journalism for what it’s worth.”

We talk about what she likes: Britney Spears, fashion, Big Brother, pornography, Madonna, Dr Dre, Hollywood films before 1958—American Beauty being the only exception. And then there’s Eminem, her big obsession. The white rap artist who’s been accused of promoting homophobia, rape and murder in his music. He’s also facing criminal charges. “I think he’s a genius,” Smith says. “I think he’s a very rare artist in that he’s Billboard number one, but he’s also totally uncompromising and extremely brilliant. He just believes in narrative absolutely so he’s telling a story and it’s really none of your fucking business what happens in the story, and who gets killed or raped or whatever. He’s incredibly brave and he wants to take art back to something a bit rawer and I think that’s kinda cool.

“I haven’t got any time for really lame backlash crap. It’s so hideous. Even the points I can’t follow him on—like his homophobia; I can’t follow [John] Updike’s homophobia but it doesn’t mean he can’t write, you know? There’s a constant confusion with rap artists and it’s one that Eminem talks about again and again—that they do what they say. The point of being a rap artist is you don’t rob banks because you’ve found something else to do, that’s why you rap. You’ve found something which means that you don’t have to rob banks, or shoot people or rape women. You’ve found some other way of making money and expressing yourself, that’s kind of the point.

“Why people can’t understand that talking in the first person in a rap is exactly the same as talking in the first person in a novel is completely fucking beyond me. I can’t understand it. Apparently, Eminem is writing a book—which I’m very excited about. That’s if he lives to do it, which I very much doubt. But if you look at the past few years, I believe he’s the one artist who has made people think more than any other.”

With the interview over, I watch her leave and hope she is able to sit down and write again soon because there’s nothing worse than creative destruction, especially considering the calibre of Zadie Smith’s talent.

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This interview was published in Australian Style in 2001. Since that time, Smith, now a multi-award winning novelist and Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, has had numerous books published including: Piece Of Flesh (2001)—an anthology of erotic stories; The Autograph Man (2002); On Beauty (2005)—winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction;  and Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009)—a collection of essays on writing. Smith also wrote the introduction to the brilliant The Burned Children of America (2003), a collection of 18 short stories by a new generation of American writers.

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