Paying Attention with Zadie Smith

Like Coetzee’s, Zadie Smith’s novels and essays involve themselves persistently with education and formation. With a mixture of structural homage and ironic reference, the fragmentary, polyvocal NW (2012) adapts the developmental imperatives of the classic bildungsroman from a nineteenth-century national-industrial context to a contemporary global frame. On Beauty (2005) explicitly satirizes higher education as a launching pad for recalibrated encounters with art and literature. Both novels depict mostly failures to strike a salubrious balance between singular fulfillment and social integration, specifically via education, but present a theory of aesthetic engagement reliant on principles of ethical empathy and reading, which Smith also sketches in her essays. On Beauty’s emphasis on the anti-hierarchical, singular encounter with the work of art and NW’s manipulation of formative and configurative patterns serve to reorient readers’ modes of attention and empathy as conditioned by alterity. By weaving direct critique of the hypocrisies of institutional education into various styles of narrative formation and perspective, Smith highlights the novel’s own brand of individualized education: indeterminate and uncertain, and dependent on specific readerly engagements, which underscores the immeasurable, unpredictable, and exclusive possibilities of literature for readers mired in a digital, data-driven world.