In 2023, the formerly edgy became the new canonical. At least that’s what the LRB thought of Zadie Smith’s last book. But was the darling of the Anglo-American literary establishment even edgy to begin with? Surely her debut White Teeth …
How Zadie Smith succumbed to history
Why bother with fiction? That’s one question. Why bother with history? That’s another. And they’ve both been torturing Zadie Smith, who has now produced the sort of fiction she once dismissed as “aesthetically and politically conservative by definition” — a …
