Intimations

Written during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, this slim collection gathers six personal essays in which novelist Zadie Smith reflects on the feelings and ideas provoked by a rapidly unfolding global crisis. Smith writes from the position she happens to occupy: a middle-aged writer, mother, and Black British woman living between New York and London as the world transforms around her.

The first essay, "Peonies," begins before the pandemic, with Smith recalling her tightly scheduled New York life, where she divided her days into rigid 45-minute blocks. One day, she stopped unexpectedly at the Jefferson Market Garden, gripping its iron bars and staring at pink-and-orange tulips alongside two other middle-aged women, all drawn by the same instinct. She references Vladimir Nabokov's anecdote about a caged ape whose first drawing depicted the bars of its own cage, using it to consider how circumstance shapes perception. Smith reflects on her younger self's resistance to being defined by female biology, seeing these as a gendered cage her brothers were spared. This desire for control connects to her identity as a writer: writing, she argues, is not a creative act but an act of control, "all resistance" (6). She cites Søren Kierkegaard's parable of "The Dog Kennel by the Palace," in which a thinker builds a grand philosophical system but lives in the dog kennel beside it, to illustrate the gap between controlled work and messy life. Those tulips she wanted to be peonies arrived just days before an "unprecedented April" made "a nonsense of every line" (10), a small preview of the pandemic's larger lesson about submission.

In "The American Exception," Smith examines America's relationship to death. She opens with a quotation from the president (identifiable as Donald Trump), who on March 29, 2020, claimed America "didn't have death" (11). Smith treats this as an inadvertent truth: America has historically treated death not as a universal absolute but as a series of discrete, solvable problems, linking the best chance of survival to money more emphatically than any other nation. Yet the pandemic's supposedly democratic quality proves overstated: Black and Latino people are dying at twice the rate of white and Asian people, and infection maps track income brackets rather than randomness. Smith draws a parallel to postwar Britain, where Winston Churchill lost to Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, because the public wanted a new social contract rather than the old life restored. She argues that health care, as postwar Europe decided, should not be governed by private interest.

"Something to Do" explores art, labor, time, and love. The truest answer to why she writes, Smith admits, is simply that writing is "something to do," a phrase now on everyone's lips as people bake banana bread and dress dogs as cats. She distinguishes between the socially tolerated but essentially purposeless space of art and the vital labor of essential workers, noting that the pandemic collapses this division. The crisis also reveals a political possibility: collective recognition that workers without security or sick leave deserve structural protection. Citing the writer Ottessa Moshfegh, Smith reflects on the idea that without love, life is just "doing time." Writing, she concludes, is no substitute for love, and the real task, the difficulties of love on the other side of the wall from her laptop, cannot be scheduled or controlled.

In "Suffering Like Mel Gibson," Smith argues that suffering is absolute and personal, unlike privilege, which can be recognized and modified. The essay takes its title from a meme of Mel Gibson calmly speaking to a blood-soaked Jesus Christ on the set of The Passion of the Christ, captioned with a joke about explaining pandemic isolation to friends with small children, illustrating how people measure their suffering against others'. Smith demonstrates the nature of privilege through an anecdote: at a sandwich shop, she overheard two women discussing a white woman who had given a 900-dollar iPad to a baby and prepared to join their critique of irresponsible parenting, only to realize the women's outrage was about the cost, not the technology. Her class privilege had caused her to mistake one ethical argument for another. While class can be acknowledged, suffering cannot be similarly mediated: she cites a 17-year-old who died by suicide three weeks into lockdown because she could not see her friends. The girl's suffering, though not comparable to a nurse's, was absolute. Smith urges readers to acknowledge their own suffering so they might extend the same recognition to others.

"Screengrabs," the longest essay, consists of seven character sketches modeled after the work of writer and critic John Berger. Smith profiles Ben, a masseur at a nail place in lower Manhattan whose habitual optimism gives way to anxiety on slow days, revealing the economic precariousness behind a small business. She recounts leaving New York in the pandemic's early days and encountering an unhoused man who uses a wheelchair, someone she had once fictionalized, who loudly dismisses the virus as "a COLD" and refuses to flee. She profiles Barbara, an elderly Greenwich Village neighbor who, on Smith's last day in the city, quietly assures her that the building is a community and there is nothing to fear. She reflects on Cy, a young IT worker whose joyful personal style represents the only form of insistence available to a generation burdened with debt. In a London vignette, Smith recalls an older Jamaican woman from the Stonebridge Estate, a housing estate in northwest London. Smith connects the woman to her own mother, who during lockdown video calls reports on the lack of protective equipment on her ward for mothers with schizophrenia, her garden's progress, and family news. One day, her mother reveals that a young woman from the estate was killed by her boyfriend during lockdown, after which the boyfriend set the flat on fire. Smith also describes an Asian man in Washington Square Park carrying a sign reading "I AM A SELF-HATING ASIAN. LET'S TALK!" About a month into lockdown, the man emails the university faculty describing his condition as "ethno-racial dysphoria," his term for distress about his own racial identity. The message prompts debate over whether it reflects provocation or a mental health condition.

The essay's final section, "Postscript: Contempt as a Virus," extends the virus metaphor to argue that contempt is the foundational disease of American racism. In the eyes of contempt, a person is "something less than a whole person, not quite a complete citizen" (73). Smith identifies the killing of George Floyd by a police officer who knelt on Floyd's neck as the virus's deadliest manifestation and traces its origin to a slave ship 400 years ago, where the enslaver reverse-engineered contempt from a situation he created: seeing chained people and concluding they must be the type who wore chains. She argues that the virus's DNA is fundamentally economic, passed through institutions and the prison-industrial complex, and that it infects even progressive Americans who maintain segregated schools and neighborhoods while supporting policies that ensure a permanent underclass. The virus is most effectively fought, she contends, when all economically exploited people act in solidarity regardless of race. She once believed that naming and protesting the virus would bring society to herd immunity. She no longer believes this.

The final essay, "Intimations," subtitled "Debts and Lessons," takes the form of 27 numbered entries, each named for a person or concept and cataloging a debt Smith owes or a lesson received. Entries honor her mother's undimmed childishness, her father's readiness to admit failure, teachers who showed that joy and rigor are inseparable, and friends like Darren, whose experience demonstrated that prejudice is most dangerous when preserved in systems. Cultural figures appear as well: Muhammad Ali taught solidarity through his refusal to fight in Vietnam, and Zora Neale Hurston modeled finding one's own language. The final entry, "Contingency," catalogs the accidents of Smith's formation: growing up at a moment of social transition in England, absorbing Anglican hymns and Caribbean heritage, meeting a partner whose love freed her from seeking validation through work. She closes by noting that her physical and moral cowardice have never truly been tested, "until now" (97).