Possessed of both imaginative empathy and an astringent wit, rigorously nonjudgmental yet armed with a state-of-the-art bullshit detector, Zadie Smith’s nonfiction glimmers with the same cultural and emotional acuity that illuminated her novels White Teeth and On Beauty. In Changing My Mind, a collection of criticism, essays, and reviews for outlets such as The New Yorker and the U.K. Guardian, her instincts are expansive, inclusive, democratic, yet fiercely personal. Her reflections on Barack Obama’s and her own multifaceted cultural identities are also an encomium of “the many-coloured voice, the multiple sensibility,” which Smith illustrates using the likes of Eliza Doolittle, Cary Grant and William Shakespeare. Her default pronoun is always we, even if her reference points are hers alone. Writing about Zora Neale Hurston, Smith self-deprecatingly catalogues how Their Eyes Were Watching God broke down her youthful prejudices (against “mythic” language, against colloquial dialogue, against the “love tribulations of women,” against “identifying” with a novel due to race or gender…), and in the process crafts a perfect marriage of literary criticism and first-person essay.

Changing My Mind is open to anything: close readings of Kafka, Barthes, Nabokov, Middlemarch; a rueful snapshot of modern-day Liberia that suggests Smith’s largely untapped gifts as a reporter; a suite of candid, moving recollections of her late father (to whom the book is dedicated); an ebullient, too-brief foray into weekly movie reviewing (for the Telegraph). The last section is given over entirely to a long, searching piece on David Foster Wallace, one in which Smith is frank about the occasional agonies of the DFW reading experience but sure of its hard-earned ecstasies: “His reader needs to think of herself as a musician, spreading the sheet music – the gift of the work – over the music stand, electing to play.” Idea by idea and sentence by sentence, Changing My Mind is a dazzling endorsement of reading as play, in both the theatrical and recreational senses of the word.

Jessica Winter