Essays of the public pen

'THIS book was written without my knowledge," says Zadie Smith in the preface to Changing my Mind.

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays By Zadie Smith Hamish Hamilton, 308pp, $45

'THIS book was written without my knowledge," says Zadie Smith in the preface to Changing my Mind. By her account, just as life is what happens while you're busy making plans, this collection of essays assembled itself by accident when Smith found herself unable to complete her fourth novel or what she calls a "solemn, theoretical" book about writing called Fail Better.

Don't believe her. Sure, some of the pieces gathered here are slight and many more are shaped to a particular moment; but there is not a single page where Smith, one of the most talented and thoughtful authors to emerge in the Oughts, doesn't pull off some minor coup of style or substance, or get her ideas to reverberate with those contained in other, seemingly unrelated essays.

More importantly, when your solemn, theoretical thoughts on the state of literature past, present and future have grown increasingly pragmatic and essentially joyous over time, pre-emptively admitting defeat is a rhetorical gambit worthy of that wily old buffer, and this book's guiding spirit, E. M. Forster.

It's the kind of collection, as Smith readily admits, that results from growing up in public. White Teeth was less a novel than a cultural phenomenon, in part because its preternaturally knowing author was just 21 when it appeared.

In the years that followed, readers have expected Smith to observe a smooth, unbroken consistency in the theory and practice of her art. But writing isn't like that. It moves with the laborious zigzags of an old mountain railway. For the re-readings, renunciations and renovations of principle aired in these pages, Changing My Mind turns out to be a perfectly literal title.

Take the opening essay, which returns to the author's book-drenched early years in north London. Smith's mother gives the teenage girl a novel by Zora Neale Hurston to read. This is long before the African-American novelist was discovered by English departments across the US and duly canonised. Back then, Smith suggests, novels such as Their Eyes were Watching God were semi-Samizdat, pages passed mainly among postwar generations of black women.

Smith recalls the embarrassment of the gift - the sense of racial identification that it implied - then the unprecedented and exhilarating experience of succumbing to it:

After that first reading of the novel, I wept ... and not simply for the perfection of the writing, nor even the real loss I felt upon leaving the world contained in its pages. It meant something more than all of that to me, something I could not, or would not, articulate.

It is not that Smith slackens her literary objectivity to belatedly admit Hurston into some pantheon of worthy writers. Instead, she uses her own biography to explore the blind spots and disservices we can do those writers who touch on some sore point in ourselves or the larger culture.

What follows is a volley against what Smith sees as the sins of an academic industry that uncritically values writers on the basis of sex or race.

Gratifying as it would be to agree that black women writers have consistently rejected the falsification of their experience, the honest reader knows that this is simply not the case. In place of negative falsification, we have nurtured, in the past 30 years, a new fetishisation. Black female protagonists ... process grandly through novels thick with a breed of greeting card lyricism.

Like a spirit level seeking its true, Smith uses her critical skills to balance competing extremities: a frightened refusal of Hurston at age 14, and the hyperbolic praise of the writer by so many others. What starts out as a thoughtful account of a significant writer ends up as something bigger: "I want my limits to be drawn by my sensibilities, not my melanin count."

Similarly, Smith's wonderful essay E. M Forster, Middle Manager, on one of her touchstone writers, opens with an admission of the author's shortcomings that turns into a paean to Forster's negative splendour.

He didn't lean rightward with the years or allow nostalgia to morph into misanthropy; he never knelt for pope or queen, nor did he flirt with Hitler, Stalin or Mao; he never believed the novel was dead [and] did not come to feel that England had gone to hell in a handbasket, that its language was doomed, that lunatics were running the asylum or foreigners swamping the cities.

It's worth noting that, even as she celebrates the exemplary mildness of her hero, Smith employs a particular language of pure contemporary swagger.

Just as in the Hurston piece, in which her haughty Oxbridge manner brought a crisp exactitude to exploring the American's warm-blooded folk art, Smith's talent as a critic lies in picking authors whose difference from her, and distance from the present, offers a solid surface to strike sparks off.

Even when concerned with writers closer in age and spirit, Smith uses her talent for mimicry to generate rhetorical friction. In her sly critique of Joseph O'Neill's formally conservative novel Netherland, for example, Smith comes down on the side of an opposing school, praising metafiction's cool cerebralism. Yet in a brilliant re-reading of those mid-century giants, Nabokov and Roland Barthes, she adopts an earnest humanism quite at odds with Barthes's continental philosophy.

Having once wanted to tear down the icon of the author and abolish, too, the idea of a privileged reader, Smith now sees this impulse as rather isolating because it jettisons the very idea of communication. Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. To this end I find myself placing a cautious faith in the difficult partnership between reader and writer ... Not a refusal of meaning then, but a quest for it.

But to question these convincing and elegantly stated contradictions is to criticise the wrong book: Fail Better, with its rigid systems, sleeps on in Smith's desk-drawer. Reading through these various pieces, the author explains of Changing my Mind's crooked logic:

I'm forced to recognise that ideological inconsistency is, for me, practically an article of faith. As is a cautious, optimistic creed, best expressed by Saul Bellow. There may be truths on the side of life.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic.