I’m in the middle of reading Zadie Smith’s new novel, and it’s one of her best, I think. It addresses\u00a0all her usual topics\u2014race and its various mixes, growing up in North London, power relationships between girls, sexual\u00a0relationships between men and women, the allure of a special talent (whether it be beauty or intelligence or something else), and so on.\u00a0But in addition there is a new subject, which is dance. \u00a0And Smith is very, very smart about dance, both in terms of how it feels to the dancer and how it affects the viewer. \u00a0Here, for instance, is one of my favorite\u00a0passages in the novel: “…for a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him. Picasso would be incomprehensible to Rembrandt, but Nijinsky would understand Michael Jackson.”<\/p>\n
Perhaps I am primed to appreciate Swing Time<\/em> even more than I usually would, because in December I had an experience that mimics one of the key experiences of its\u00a0narrator\u2014the experience, in fact, that gives the book its title. Watching Fred Astaire perform in the movie Swing Time<\/em>, this unnamed narrator\u00a0is shocked to realize that a “shadow” sequence she had particularly loved features\u00a0Astaire wearing\u00a0blackface: obliviously, almost carelessly, as if it were\u00a0completely normal.<\/p>\n A few weeks ago, fleeing from the inadequacies of La La Land<\/em>, I resorted\u00a0for comfort to\u00a0an old Busby Berkeley musical, Babes on Broadway<\/em>, that happened to be playing at Film Forum. It was made in 1941, and it featured the young Judy Garland, whom I have always loved, and the young Mickey Rooney, whom I have often hated\u2014though in this case his virtues, and especially his dance virtues, came to the fore. The plot was typically silly, but the dance numbers were terrific, and I was just congratulating myself on having chosen this gem when we came to the final number, which lasted about ten or fifteen minutes in real time and seemed endless. It consisted of about eighty white dancers in blackface, backing up a blackface Mickey Rooney and a blackface Judy Garland\u2014all performing\u00a0in full Busby Berkeley style, with tapping and singing and stage-craft galore. As if to make matters infinitely worse, Judy Garland’s song (emerging from a white-rimmed pinkish hole in the middle of that heavily blackened face) was all about the birth of a baby named Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones. The thrust of the song\u2014the thing we were meant to find hilarious\u2014was the pride-filled mother’s ridiculously mistaken notion\u00a0that her black son might\u00a0actually become President someday, just like his namesake.<\/p>\n As we left the theater, I turned to my husband and said, “Sometimes nostalgia deserves a punch in the face.” We had been so confident in our retreat to the past, our choice of this particular alternative to the reduced present, that we had forgotten how naively\u00a0cruel that old America was. And however bad things seem now (and they do seem very, very bad), I am pretty sure we will\u00a0never go back to a\u00a0time when it was ludicrous to imagine that a black man could be President of the United States.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m in the middle of reading Zadie Smith’s new novel, and it’s one of her best, I think. It addresses\u00a0all her usual topics\u2014race and its various mixes, growing up in North London, power relationships between girls, sexual\u00a0relationships between men and … Continue reading