In this episode, John interviews the celebrated British writer Zadie Smith. Zadie’s horror at the idea of rereading her own novels opens the show; she can more easily imagine rewriting one (as John’s beloved Willa Cather once did) than having to go through them all again. From there the conversation quickly moves through Brexit (oh, the inhumanity!) and what it means to be a London–no, a Northwest London–writer before arriving at her case against identity politics. That case is bolstered by a discussion of Hannah Arendt on the difference between who and what a person is. As Zadie puts it, “When you say my people, you can[‘t] know for certain who those people are by looking at them and by hearing what they have to say. I think what fiction as a kind of philosophy always assumed is that what people make manifest is not all that people are. There’s a great part of human selves which are hidden, unknown to the self, obscure, and that’s the part that fiction is interested in.”
Zadie and John also touch on the purpose of criticism and why it gets harder to hate as you (middle) age. She reveals an affection for “talkies” (as a “90’s kid,” she can’t help her fondness for Quentin Tarantino); asks whether young novelists in England need to write a book about Henry VIII just to break into bookstores; hears Hegel talking to Kierkegaard, and Jane Austen failing to talk to Jean Genet. Lastly, in Recallable Books, Zadie recommends Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s The Bathroom.
Mentioned in this episode:
Zadie Smith, White Teeth, NW, Swing Time, “Two Paths for the Novel” “Embassy of Cambodia,” Joni Mitchell: Some Notes on Attunement” “Zadie Smith on J G Ballard’s Crash“
Willa Cather, Song of the Lark (1915, revised 1932)
Elif Batuman, The Idiot
Charlotte Bronte, The Professor and Villette
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Pauline Kael, various film reviews
Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood
Ursula Le Guin, “The Story’s Where I Go: An Interview”
Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child
Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black and Wolf Hall
Dexter Filkins, “The Moral Logic of Humanitarian Intervention” (on Samantha Power)
Patti Smith, Just Kids
Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge, Olive Again
Gary Winick (dir.), Thirteen Going on Thirty (starring Jennifer Garner, not Anne Hathaway)
Sally Rooney, Normal People
Matthew Lopez, The Inheritance
Jean-Philippe Toussaint, The Bathroom
Listen to the episode here:
Transcript of the episode here:
Pro Tip: Zadie Smith also generously recorded some PSA’s for RTB. You might even call them our first celebrity endorsements. Prick up your ears and try to catch their first public airing, coming soon…
Recall This Book 