Zadie Smith and Anne Enright help us make sense of troubling times

Essay collections gather a writer’s thoughts over time and can be read as an oblique form of memoir, one in which the self is revealed through a series of conversations with the world.

Two new collections by celebrated novelists – Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive and Anne Enright’s Attention: Writing on Life, Art and the World – tell the stories of our time from within the unfolding cultural moment. The essay, as it appears in these collections, is a response to minds, art, communities and culture, understood through a writer’s body, intellect and being.

Different sensibilities are at work in these collections, but a quotation from each might give an overall sense of the mode. Smith writes:

the people we tend to call geniuses are in reality always in communication with other minds, other artists, their own communities and the culture at large.

Enright, writing on Helen Garner’s diaries, notes something Garner’s former husband “V” said of her:

You think things right through, by prisming them through yourself.

The new commons

Smith has been famous since the publication in 2000 of White Teeth, her dazzling novel of multicultural London, but she has become known as a public intellectual as well as a novelist. She is a prolific essayist. Dead and Alive draws on the past decade, during which she has published two other collections: Intimations and Feel Free.

In her foreword, Smith writes that her essays often emerge from an encounter. This might be with art, film, politics, urban life, history (particularly Black history), literature or writers themselves. The collection includes obituaries for the likes of Toni Morrison, Hilary Mantel and Martin Amis.

These encounters are of their time. “This book cannot scrub its history as the ground shifts beneath it,” Smith writes. “It is not being written by an infinite and eternally unscrolling artificial intelligence, but by a human being in a particular moment.”

Smith is concerned with real people, real intelligence, language formed by experience, and communication with others through writing and reading. Certain terms and themes recur: the crucial and continually eroded space of the commons; freedom in reading, writing and life; language as container and tool, and sometimes as a “battlefield”; and a continual negotiation of self in relation to the larger culture. Thoughts on the predations of the internet and AI work their way through many of these essays.

For Smith, the essay is an important site of the “commons”, originally the place where different interest groups came together to resist the enclosure of open land. As with this earlier space of resistance, it provides a forum in which one might tap into what she calls “solidarity in alterity”. “Essaying,” Smith wrote recently in the New Yorker, is “a stumbling attempt to recreate, in language, a common space, one that is open to all.” This tension between difference and togetherness is central to Smith’s essays, particularly in those about the act of writing itself. In a much-discussed essay from 2019, Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction, she explores the idea of cultural appropriation in fiction. At the time, it was a hot and divisive topic. It is still simmering away in many a creative writing workshop. Marginalised writers, Smith argues, have justifiably sought freedom from the “limited – and limiting – fantasies and projections of other people”. Nevertheless, she resists the idea that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally “like” us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally […] I do not believe that. I could not have written a single one of my books if I did. Walt Whitman’s line, “I contain multitudes”, has been used as a defence of the ways in which novelists cannibalise the experiences of others to create their worlds. A different American writer, Smith ventures, might offer a friendlier, more curious approach. Emily Dickinson measures “every Grief I meet”, wondering whether it weighs similarly to her own. Dickinson is “fascinated to presume” that some griefs may be understandable in these terms. We have something in common with other people, Smith argues, and a curiosity about their griefs is an important capacity of writing and reading. She continually seeks ways to navigate between “I” and “we” through language. In a later essay on writing, she asks, via a consideration of James Baldwin: What would a sentence look like that didn’t follow a formula? One that remains connected to the mysteries of personhood but also committed to the story of the people? These are sentences in which we are offered “complex depictions of human consciousness”. Identity – one’s story of oneself, as Smith puts it – has shared realities, but is irreducible. This is the essence of art, why it is so necessary. Shared realities are significant to Smith’s thinking. An ode to Stormzy at Glastonbury begins by referring to the British rapper as “our young black king”. It is a thrilling story of “arrival”, not just of a talent beloved by his community, but of the day when the hyphenated “Black-British” would appear, to the English ear, as permanent and central a condition as “African American”.

In essays about art and ways of seeing, Smith identifies a similar crime in racism and misogyny: a failure to recognise the agency of the person or people being seen. The subjects of colonial art, she writes, are “never exotic in and of themselves […] they sit at the very centre of their own worlds”.

In her reading of a memoir by Celia Paul – muse to Lucian Freud, but more fundamentally an artist and writer – Smith describes Paul crying through sittings, unable to see her own ambition as Freud reduces her to object. Smith concludes that misogyny is “a form of distortion, a way of not seeing”.

In Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Visions of Power, Smith argues that “love is radical” because “it forces us into a fuller recognition of the other”. Drawing on the work of philosopher Frantz Fanon, in a formulation that feels fundamental to the collection – and to fiction – she proposes that, in the artist’s overturning of colonial power structures, “the right of every being to its dignity is recognized. That is decolonisation.”

Voices, bodies and time

The essays of Booker Prize-winning Irish novelist Anne Enright have a similar commitment to the dignity of the too-often disregarded self. The collection is divided into three sections: Voices, Bodies and Time. These are broadly focused on literature, women and workers, and memory. The question of time is present from the outset, in the brief reflections that preface each essay.

The first piece, The Cat Sat on the Mat, is a brief excerpt from a lecture Enright gave as Laureate for Irish Fiction. It tells the maddening story of an experiment by novelist Catherine Nichols. Sending out queries to agents, Nichols found that she was eight and a half times more likely to receive a positive response if she replaced her name with “George”.

The lecture from which the piece was taken was given in November 2016, the month Donald Trump defeated Hilary Clinton, and its preface includes the following thoughts:

Here is a piece from a mere eight years and two lifetimes ago. In the first lifetime, the work of women writers started to get its due; in the second, everything else happened.

Enright’s prefaces ask the reader to think about how things have gone since the essay’s appearance. In the preface to another essay, titled The Monsters of #MeToo, she writes: “I am glad I was here to record this moment, before the push-back came.” Recalling the outpouring of stories of sexual assault following the exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s crimes, she draws attention, in the essay itself, to the way time works on the understanding of an event:

It is difficult to remember a time when this information was new – perhaps it never was – but there was a day – two years ago – when it was all said together…

This consideration of how the moment unfolds, registers, lingers, and is possibly disavowed, calls attention to the relationship between essays and our understanding of events. Essays are not quite the “first draft of history” attributed to journalism. They carry the charge – the disruptive energy – of the moment, but time, knowledge and synthesis are brought to bear.

Essays of this kind do not claim objectivity. One of the compelling qualities of The Monsters of #MeToo, and others in the collection, is the controlled fury evident in the accumulation and placement of stories of injustice. The wry tone and graceful orchestration of thoughts draw you in and enable you to share the anger, without being consumed by it.