Smith fails

Zadie Smith waffles for what seems an eternity in an essay that can be best summed up as "writers know writing better than critics and here's some postmodernist theory to explain why anyone with taste thinks my novels are shit". Okay, it's about more than that, but I drifted off and ended up barely even skimming it. There is nothing more boring than a writer like Smith talking about writing. Her pompous, overconsidered style is unreadable and hides that she really doesn't have very much to say. This is first-year cultural studies, predictable and unoriginal.

Curiously though, the impression I took away is that Smith, who has always struck me as entirely lacking in self-awareness, is aware that her good reviews are constructed entirely from hype and that her books are poor. But, luckily, it's all the reader's fault.

I don't write about writing very much because it's dull to talk about. I could discuss the mechanics a bit more but because so few people were interested in my second workshop, I think, well, fuck it, no one's interested in writing at the moment, and I'm not interested in talking to myself about it. But if I did, I wouldn't waste hours writing the obvious, as Smith has here. Yes, writers end up with a book that doesn't resemble their dream (most of us are aware that we have to compromise with the dream and kill our darlings, and that our ability will not match our expectation); yes, readers don't always get the meaning we intended (how curiously modernist -- and wrong -- Smith's view of the failure of the reader is; reading is a negotiation, a discourse between writer and reader -- the reader does not "fail" if they construct a different meaning from that intended, because that is precisely what they are supposed to do -- construct a meaning, I mean); yes, the dream of the perfect novel drives us crazy; yes, the reader has the opportunity to see the world through other eyes (one of the more obvious reasons one reads, of course, is that a writer claims to have "insight").

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:54 am