Changing My Mind

Zadie Smith presents a collection of seventeen essays written over roughly a decade for various publications. As she explains in the foreword, the book took shape almost accidentally: While she was working on a novel and a theoretical book about writing, she accumulated approximately one hundred thousand words in response to editorial requests on topics ranging from Kafka to Liberia to Katharine Hepburn. The title reflects her conviction that ideological inconsistency is practically an article of faith, and the essays are organized into five thematic sections: "Reading," "Being," "Seeing," "Feeling," and "Remembering."

The "Reading" section opens with Smith's account of her resistant first encounter, at age fourteen, with Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her mother gave her the book, and Smith resented the implied racial motivation, preferring to think of her reading as freely chosen. Upon actually reading it, she found her literary defenses dismantled by Hurston's prose and finished it in three hours, weeping. She argues that Hurston's genius lies in individual talent rather than in any collective tradition, while acknowledging that as a Black woman, part of the novel reaches her in ways that standard literary criticism cannot fully account for. An essay on E. M. Forster's BBC radio broadcasts positions Forster as a writer who deliberately occupied the middle ground, neither modernist nor conservative, whose conversational book recommendations carried serious moral weight without intellectual vanity. She praises his defense of literary diversity and his wartime commitment to liberal humanism. Her essay on George Eliot's Middlemarch uses Henry James's 1873 review as a starting point, arguing that the novel's famous diffuseness is a deliberate philosophical achievement. Drawing on the philosopher Baruch Spinoza's concept of conatus, a dynamic striving toward the good, she makes the case that the seemingly commonplace Fred Vincy is Eliot's ideal character because he stumbles upon his good through being fully open to life. In "Rereading Barthes and Nabokov," Smith mediates between Roland Barthes's argument for the death of the author and Vladimir Nabokov's insistence on authorial control, concluding that she now places cautious faith in the partnership between reader and writer. Her essay on Franz Kafka draws on Louis Begley's biographical study to explore the gap between the metaphysical Kafka of legend and the quotidian man of historical fact, arguing that Kafka's alienation from collective identity has become a universal template in the 21st century. The section closes with "Two Directions for the Novel," which contrasts Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Tom McCarthy's Remainder as representing two antipodal futures for fiction: lyrical realism, the richly descriptive tradition descended from Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, and its radical refusal.

The "Being" section shifts toward Smith's own creative practice and her direct encounters with the world. In "That Crafty Feeling," a lecture given at Columbia University, she divides novelists into two types: Macro Planners, who organize plot and structure before drafting, and Micro Managers, who build sentence by sentence. She identifies herself as a Micro Manager, describes her obsessive reworking of opening pages, and confesses her evolving, often nauseated relationship with her own published books. "One Week in Liberia" is a day-by-day account of a trip with the humanitarian organization Oxfam to a country devastated by civil war. Smith documents the destroyed infrastructure, the 86 percent unemployment rate, and a school system in desperate need of resources. She meets Evelyn B. Momoh, a fourteen-year-old who vibrates with intelligence and impatience, and Richard S. Jack, a fifteen-year-old former child soldier who dreams of becoming a pilot. She reports on the Firestone rubber plantations, where workers earn 35 American dollars a month, and traces the history of the Americo-Liberians, freed American slaves who founded the colony in 1822, and their troubled relationship with Indigenous populations. In "Speaking in Tongues," based on a lecture at the New York Public Library, Smith argues for the value of vocal and cultural flexibility. She traces her own acquisition of a new voice at Cambridge, examines George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion as a cautionary tale about losing one's original self, and reads Barack Obama's memoir Dreams from My Father as a counter-narrative in which having multiple voices is a gift. She connects this flexibility to Shakespeare's negative capability, a concept coined by the poet John Keats to describe the capacity for "being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" (144), and to the 17th-century statesman Halifax, who proudly called himself a trimmer, one who steers between extremes.

The "Seeing" section turns to film. A two-part essay pairs Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo: Smith eulogizes Hepburn, tracing her East Coast upbringing, her early career struggles, and her partnership with Spencer Tracy, while examining Garbo as a transitional figure in the history of how women are seen on screen. In "Notes on Visconti's Bellissima," she analyzes the 1951 Italian film starring Anna Magnani, arguing that Magnani's naturalism overwhelms the film's neorealist framework, a postwar style focused on ordinary social reality. Where Bette Davis and Joan Crawford traded human transience for eternal iconicity, Magnani appears without artifice. A collection of mainstream film reviews from 2006 covers titles ranging from Munich to Syriana, with Smith defending Steven Spielberg as one of the great popular artists and praising Syriana for its scrupulous multicultural casting. "Ten Notes on Oscar Weekend" records her observations at the Academy Awards in numbered vignettes, noting an inverse relationship between proximity to the ceremony and excitement about it.

The "Feeling" section is the most personal. "Smith Family Christmas" builds around a damaged photograph from approximately 1980, sketching the family's Christmas rituals on a London council estate and reflecting on the tyranny of tradition. "Accidental Hero" documents Smith's attempt to record her father Harvey's World War II experience. Harvey enlisted at seventeen, landed at King Beach on D-Day hours after the worst fighting, and always insisted he had an easy day. He received shrapnel in his groin from a mortar bomb attracted by the light of a tea fire he had made at night, an incident that killed others and that Harvey still considers his fault. He helped liberate the Belsen concentration camp and spent a year in postwar Germany befriending ordinary Germans, yet he stubbornly refused to call himself brave. "Dead Man Laughing" interweaves grief at Harvey's death with reflections on British comedy. Smith describes comedy as the vital link across the widening class divide between father and daughter: They could not discuss Anna Karenina, but they could always talk about Basil Fawlty, a character from the sitcom Fawlty Towers. She recounts watching the show with Harvey in his nursing home and follows her brother Ben's subsequent transformation into a stand-up comedian, connecting Harvey's life to a lineage of British comic characters clinging to the middle rungs of England's class ladder.

The final section, "Remembering," consists of a single long essay on David Foster Wallace's story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, written as both a close reading and a memorial after Wallace's death. Smith frames the essay around the concept of literary gifts, arguing that Wallace's formidable intellect was a facility he chose to interrogate rather than exploit. She traces his insistence that fiction should give something to the reader rather than merely display the author's talent. Through close readings of stories like "Forever Overhead" and Brief Interview #20, the so-called Granola Cruncher story in which a young woman who has been raped creates a soul connection with her attacker, Smith argues that Wallace's hideous men are trapped alone in language, their verbosity serving as armor against genuine connection. The escape route his fiction explores draws on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's idea that language functions not in isolation but through relationships between persons. Smith identifies the truly sublime moments in Wallace's work as acts of extreme focus and self-relinquishment, which she describes not as meditation but as prayer, and concludes that Wallace understood art as humanity's best hope of undergoing this experience.