"Intimations" by Zadie Smith

I remember the first time I heard about the pandemic in fiction. I was listening to the New Yorker Writer's Voice podcast, and the story was set during the pandemic, though the crisis wasn't the primary focus of the piece. It felt strangely dissonant--to hear about my bizarre reality in a fictional world. It still feels that literature should exist without masks, without constant hand-washing, without literal isolation.

Zadie's Smith's Intimations is a series of nonfiction essays, written early in the pandemic. Because they're nonfiction, they shouldn't feel as surreal as fiction. After all, I've read (too) many essays in newspapers and magazines about the pandemic. Nonetheless, assembling reflective and philosophical essays about the crisis in book form still feels odd. As if it's sacrilegious to talk about something so finitely (in a bound book!) while we're still living through it.  

Yet while part of me screams "it's too soon!", because her essays were written and assembled so early in the pandemic, it's also easy to feel how "spring 2020" many of her musings are. So much has changed in the past year they already feel cute or dated.

All of this is to convey the odd experience I felt reading Intimations, not to lodge a criticism again Smith. We're just in a weird place now. The spring of 2020 feels so long ago, and yet we're still living through (hopefully the end of) the pandemic. We're not as scared as we were in those early days, but we're more jaded.

One of the dominant themes in Smith's book is the way the pandemic has made issues of privilege even more explicit--and uneasy. In the essay "Suffering Like Mel Gibson," Smith talks about how quickly Zoom conversations required the "expected, decent and accurate claim that you are fine and privileged, lucky compared to so may others, inconvenienced, yes, melancholy often, but not suffering" (36).  Of course, Smith's readers are largely of this group--aware that their sufferings are not so great, yet still sidelined by moments "as puny as they may be in the wider scheme of things" that bring us down. 

She reinforces the unsettling questions of privilege  in a later essay, "A Man With Strong Hands," where she contrasts herself with Ben, her masseuse. Pre-Covid, their primary topic of conversation was the inconvenience of school shutdowns during snow, but even then Smith was aware of the vast gulf in inconvenience--an annoyance for her, a loss of work for Ben.

Probably the most compelling essay is her last, "Contempt as a Virus," in which she discusses American racism through the metaphor of a virus. The comparison could seem too pat, given the confluence of George Floyd's murder and the spring lockdown last year, yet Smith is able to use our conflicted feelings about and understanding of the virus to mirror back our long history of racism. For all that's been written in the aftermath of Floyd's death, the approach still offers insight--how difficult it is to reach "herd immunity" in Covid or in ending racism.

It might be interesting to reread the collection in a few years, once the pandemic is more of a memory, to see how many of her perspectives have held or shifted.