Cheers to Zadie

Excerpted from an interview with Zadie Smith in the Atlantic. I like this quite a bit. It's inspiring me to get back into my novel (which heretofore was accumulating some serious dust.)

"I always go on about not writing political dogma in books, but I don't mind feminist fiction. I don't mind banging on a bit when I'm feeling pissed off. It's not the worst thing in the world. People are too sensitive about that shit.

It's evenhanded, but you do deliver a sharp line here and there.

Every now and then. A bitch slap. It's one of the tricks of high art. You're constantly told in college and elsewhere that good taste and good fiction are about not pushing, about not expressing your opinion too forcefully. So we're always hearing things like, "Oh, it's a very good novel about a young black boy, but unfortunately the author presses too hard on the question of race."

And the same with women's fiction. It's nonsense, and it's time to stop. I felt like a hand was at my throat when I first started writing. That if I was going to be a proper writer, I'd better be as polite as possible and as calm as possible and as un-angry as possible—and recently I've been thinking, you know, fuck that, basically.

Do you think fiction is potentially a place to put your political views?

If it can be done well. You have to have a great deal of talent to do it, and the problem is that most of us don't, so when we get angry our writing does become undigested and hard to read. But there's a place for fiction that's radically furious. I might not be the person to write it, but somebody with balls should."

I always thought I wanted to write the female version of Ulysses, or something Corrections-like in its scope. Perhaps now is the time. Slightly related: I love a woman who says balls as an exclamation. Note Judy Davis as George Sand in Impromptu.

Woman of the Year. Adore it. Hate Spencer Tracy though.

Posted: Monday - September 19, 2005 at 09:07 AM |