The themes of diverging paths is an abiding one in Smith’s work, beginning with the Iqbal twins in White Teeth, and receiving a more mature treatment with the four friends in NW. Tracey’s outburst is also a neat summary of Smith’s book, a systems novel about the way two girls of similar ethnic backgrounds (both have one white and one black parent) from the same place (they are born in council estates across the street from each other in Northwest London) can grow up to have two very different fates. But you can’t control me!” The excoriation is a long time coming: Tracey and the narrator are estranged childhood friends who, at age 33, haven’t spoken to each other in a decade. People like you think you can control everything. “There can’t be no understanding between you and me any more!” a woman named Tracey screams at the narrator of Swing Time. To pose it as questions: Why do some people become famous and what are they supposed to do with fame when they get it? And what becomes of those who betray their own talents? Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Hardwick (and in the meantime wowed the world with a viral cabaret act at the Carlyle Hotel), Smith has returned to Big Ideas in her new novel, Swing Time. Along the way, she emerged as a first-class essayist. Her ostentatious turns toward the comedy of manners ( On Beauty, 2005) and then the formal techniques of modernism ( NW, 2012) seemed motivated by an anxiety about the state of the novel generally. Smith has responded to her fame by becoming a shape-shifter, a chameleon of the varieties of seriousness. It drove the poet Delmore Schwartz to booze, pills, and madness made Norman Mailer into a writer who was at his best tracing the arc of his Goodyear Blimp–size ego around the country and silenced Harper Lee. The sort of early success Smith enjoyed, at the age of 24, with the smash debut of White Teeth (2000), can have distorting effects.

The burden of having become Zadie Smith, international literary celebrity, surely hangs over the work of the novelist who bears the name. Photo: Timothy Fadek/Corbis via Getty Images

Zadie smith swing time review