What is Style?

Zadie Smith's Swing Time

I’ve just signed off on edits for a piece I’ve been working on for Los Angeles Review of Books (more on that soon), and I had a little paragraph that didn’t make the cut, a B-side of sorts. Not that I’m sloughing off my leftovers into a scrap heap over here on book(ish)—not at all. I reached the end of the piece and felt like I’d only halfway answered the question, “What does ‘stylist’ mean?” Under a word count and time constraint, I had to let it go, so I have a little unfinished business. Here’s the paragraph the editor suggested cutting:

In his introduction to Mavis Gallant’s Paris Stories, Michael Ondaatje says Gallant writes “protean prose” but that she “is light years away from writers who claim a recognizably indelible style and constant landscape.” Which is curious. Wouldn’t protean—the ability to shape-shift and mimic a variety of characters—be worthy of “stylist”? It’s hard not to think of Zadie Smith here, whose fiction varies widely in tone and timbre, and it would seem a shame to exclude her from all the talk of stylists.

“Stylist” is a term critics like to throw around. Lydia Davis has repeatedly been called a stylist, as have Grace Paley, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Nabokov, etc. etc. Mostly, those who repeatedly get called “stylists” are white, which is bizarre considering the indelibility of the prose of Toni Morrison, Percival Everett, Charles Yu, and many others. Recognizability, as Ondaatje suggests, is what critics are getting at when they say “stylist.” Show me a page at random of any Thomas Pynchon novel, and I could probably tell you it’s Thomas Pynchon. But that measure also seems strange, because a writer like Zadie Smith doesn’t quite fit into that narrow definition—at least, if we’re talking about her fiction; her nonfiction is fairly recognizable. Her prose is definitely stylish. You’ve got the long, blown-out sentences of White Teeth and the wildly jaunty, stream-of-consciousness sentences of NW. Then you have this elegant, observant voice in Swing Time. She seems to know more about the inner-workings of style than perhaps most writers who can’t shake the dominant register. Not that voice is merely something you “put on,” but, as Flannery O’Connor says, “The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live,” which I take to mean, sure, you can try to write in the voice of a trumpet or a rabid squirrel, but if there’s no oomph, you’re going to lose your readers. What do I mean by oomph? Energy, perhaps. Conviction. Part of a writer’s ability to hook—her authority—lies in the conviction of her sentences. In a 2010 interview with Eleanor Wachtel, Smith says, “Kafka I like…because the prose is extraordinary, and that’s the thing before any politics of identity or discussion of community, it’s just how you make a sentence. Zora Neale Hurston makes an extraordinary sentence, which is all hers and Kafka makes a different kind of sentence, which is all his, and I think I think that’s what matters to me first above everything else.”

You can’t fake a good sentence. And yes, “good,” is relative, individual. I’m currently reading Eskor David Johnson’s debut novel, Pay As You Go, and I want to cut, reword, and clarify, but that all comes out of my sense of “good.” When I submit to his garrulous style, I can hear the voice coming through, and it’s a great delight to be wrong—or, at least, to be challenged. Flaubert said, “One achieves style only by atrocious labour, a fanatic and unremitting stubbornness." Work, then, plus a conviction in what you’re doing: maybe that’s style. George Saunders has said that, in his MFA classroom at Syracuse, students already arrive talented writers, so he’s essentially helping them sound more like themselves. But what happens when your self—if self exists at all (hint: it doesn’t)—is one who closely observes, who can mimic, who can authenticate a variety of voices, registers, and experiments? Enter Swing Time.

The unnamed narrator grows up in London and befriends Tracey in their dance class. Tracey’s mother is white and her father is Black and serving time in prison. The narrator’s mother is Black and Jamaican, and her father is white. Tracey is brasher, riskier, and her mother coddles her, believing in her big dream to one day dance professionally. The narrator’s mother, who has academic and political aspirations, says the narrator has flat feet and is less than fond of the friendship. ‘“You’ve been raised in another way—don’t forget that.’” The girls emulate pop stars on TV, which the narrator will later, in her twenties and thirties, work for as a personal assistant. (Hence, the swinging of time.) Aimee, the massive pop star in question, resembles Madonna, maybe Kylie Minogue, maybe Angelina Jolie. Aimee decides to fund a school in Gambia, where the narrator is seen as white by the locals. As the narrator grows more discontent, she questions Aimee’s dealings in Africa, questions the ethics and purpose of the school, questions her dubious adoption of a baby they meet named Sankofa. That’s the gist—there’s much, much more, and there’s a lot to say about this novel, but many people have already written about that (dance, minstrelsy, cultural appropriation, race, class, identity, home, upward mobility, belonging), and I’m interested in the vantage point of the narration, which allows Smith to capture the confident pronouncements made by all the other characters.

The narration in hindsight gives the telling a memoir-ish feel, with the scenes swinging back and forth in time, devoted more to the movements of memory than linear plot. The narrator is more comfortable observing and with letting other people speak. Classic writerly disposition. (It’s worth noting that Smith’s follow-up novel will not be a novel at all, but a stage play, The Wife of Willesden, where polyphony is not the exception but the rule.) She is kind of blank, not quite disaffected, but restless. She says ,“I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.” Her observations are sharp, her descriptions of dancing are tremendous, and her narration is steady and even-handed. Some have criticized this, calling the narrator unlikeable or noncommittal, but I found her powers of observation so powerful and her witnessing so astute that I didn’t think twice about liking her or not. (The notion of likability has always bored me anyway.)

Here’s Tracey, commanding play when they are setting up a scenario with dolls: “‘Your turn. Say: ‘You slag—she ain’t even my kid! Is it my fault she pisses herself!’”

Here’s Aimee, coaching the narrator on how to be a better cog in her support machine as they take in some art at a London museum: “‘Another thing you should understand is that it’s not that I don’t get your British irony, I just don’t like it. I find it adolescent. Ninety-nine percent of the time when I meet British people my feeling is: grow up!’”

Here’s Hawa, the middle-class teacher’s daughter in Gambia, responding to the narrator after asking about the length of someone’s pants: “‘Oh, you mean short?’ said Hawa dully, with that gift she had for always making me feel I’d asked the most obvious question of all. ‘So his feet don’t burn in hell!’”

Mostly, Tracey’s voice gets the refrain. Later in life, when they reunite under tense circumstances, the narrator asks Tracey if she still dances. “‘Do I look like I’m still dancing?’ She looked down at herself and around the table and laughed harshly. ‘I know I was the smart one but…get a fucking clue.’”

In an interesting piece in The Millions from 2015 called “TheAudacity of Prose,” Chigozie Obioma rails against minimalism, saying “less is often inevitably less.” I’m not sure if I agree, because subtext is powerful, and I think of writers like Diane Williams or Amy Hempel, whose lean sentences are suggestive and dense, little fireworks of meaning that seem to fizz forever in the distance. Obioma, though, strikes at minimalism as a fashion—nouns, verbs, cut the adjectives, keep it simple, etc. This style, he says, has become inadequate, mannered, and flat with the torrent of “invisible” prose pumped out daily on the internet. He says,"Our prose should be the Noah’s ark that preserves language in a world that is being apocalyptically flooded with trite and weightless words.” In the end, he advocates for a mix of long and short sentences, lean and flowery description— controlled adornment. There might be a lot going on here in Swing Time, but you can be sure that it couldn’t be farther from trite or weightless. Every word matters, not only from the clever “shadow” narrator, which only makes the constellation of voices all the brighter. “Flexibility of voice leads to a flexibility in all things,” Smith says in an essay about Barack Obama’s ability to code switch. Smith’s flexibility is a generous and expansive gift, and hopefully someday she will be at the forefront of who we talk about when we talk about stylists.

Swing Time: I read this and thought of my friend and poet Ryan Sharp, who, like Smith, knows what it means to be flexible, and has taught me a lot about persona poetry over the years.

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Have you read Swing Time or any other work by Zadie Smith? I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’m excited to read her new novel, The Fraud. If you go in search of Smith’s fiction, please support your local independent booksellers, or shop online at Bookshop. Thanks, as always, for reading.