How Zadie Smith Succumbed to History

Why bother with fiction? That’s one question. Why bother with history? That’s another. And they’ve both been torturing Zadie Smith, who has now produced the sort of fiction she once dismissed as “aesthetically and politically conservative by definition” — a historical novel. But apparently her years teaching in the United States persuaded her what fans of the genre (among whose number I include myself) have long known: “Not all historical fiction cosplays its era, and an exploration of the past need not be a slavish imitation of it. You can come at the past from an interrogative angle, or a sly remove, and some historical fiction will radically transform your perspective not just on the past but on the present.”