Determined to be Zadie

Photo: Washington Post Zadie Smith's hostility to certainty stems from herupbringing, writes Boyd Tonkin. AS THIS decade sinks towards an end, its frothy beginnings nowfeel like a dream. Did all that really happen? Did, for instance, agifted, earnest and precociously erudite young writer able to ridethe twin waves of fiction and criticism with the aplomb of a newVirginia Woolf find herself swept away on a rip-tide of hype thatflung her in the public face as a sort of North London-bred BeyonceKnowles with a talent for a yarn? The record tells us it was so. And, after White Teeth in2000 saw its 25-year-old author press-ganged into poster-girl dutyfor some merrily upbeat post-millennium, new-Brit zeitgeistproject, Zadie Smith has had to spend much of the time since inrecovery. Smith, who now finds the author of that effervescentlycomic family saga ''a different person'', gave more proof of amighty potential in The Autograph Man (2002) and OnBeauty (2005). Advertisement: Story continues below Then came a period of retrenchment. She chose to teachliterature, modestly and seriously, at Harvard and Columbiauniversities. She moved to Rome with her husband, the poet andnovelist Nick Laird, to learn Italian and escape the frenzy ofpremature fame. She read, thought and wrote essays of luminousinsight, exemplary poise and deep, mature, unshowy feeling aboutthe art - and life - that matters to her, from Kafka to KatharineHepburn, E. M. Forster to British comedy, Nabokov to her late, muchmissed contemporary hero, David Foster Wallace. Changing My Mind, a harvest of those essays, lectures andreviews, bears witness to a series of shifts in gear and direction.''The idea that certainty is the highest value you can have inargument, in politics, in art - I don't understand it. I don't feelthat way,'' she says. The work Rosetta Stone Hindi V3 that captures all these transitions perms ebullientforays into canonical fiction with family memoirs, the odd travelpiece and even film reviews. ''As much as possible, I'd like to bring people along. I think there are many of my readers whowouldn't be comfortable with a book that was nothing but literarycriticism. And it wouldn't, for me, represent the things I like towrite anyway.'' Changing My Mind showcases the best of Zadie Smith:thoughtful but never pompous, agile but never glib, witty but nevercruel, with heart and head sweetly aligned. Take the trio ofelegiac pieces on her father Harvey, who died in 2006. When Smithlanded in that cloudburst of media spangles, grumblers sniped that her CV (Willesden street cred, comprehensive school, King's College, Cambridge, ''mixed race'' heritage) sounded too good to betrue. They didn't know the half of it. Because Harvey from Bromley had enlisted early and married his second, Jamaican wife, Yvonne, late (he was born in 1925; Zadie in1975), the father of the author of White Teeth fought on thebeaches of Normandy on D-day. ''He was so old,'' she says, ''that I think I'd been expectinghis death from about the age of seven or eight, in a constant state of tension.'' Writers, she says, use their work to rehearse thesepassages. ''Part of writing is the making safe of the future So I thought that as far as my father's death went, I was fully prepared, having had 25 years of waiting for it. But in factnothing does prepare you.'' His daughter's essays tell how she tried to record this''ordinary man's experience of extremity'' during thephotographer-turned-salesman's last days in a nursing home; theyexplore his affection for the lugubrious class comedy of Steptoeand Son and Tony Hancock; and evoke the bittersweet mayhem of Christmas in Willesden. Each one is a jewel. Yet the writer who, in 2000, could write a scorching anonymouscritique of her debut, scolds herself for the theft of a lovedone's life. ''It's a grim thing to admit to yourself: that theseessays will end up being in my mind more real versions of my father than my father I always think that every time a writer isborn into a family, that family has reason to fear.''

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