![]() ![]() Swing Time, her latest, is rooted in the first person-a new turn in Smith’s novels. Four years later, she has changed her mind again. ![]() Told in three styles, each for a different character’s consciousness, it embodied Smith’s belief that “flexibility of voice leads to a flexibility in all things,” an idea she once expressed in a speech about Barack Obama and code-switching. White Teeth, a Dickensian whirlwind of third-person omniscience, was the poster child for a turn-of-the-century genre the critic James Wood called “hysterical realism.” Her fourth novel, NW (2012), was a concise experiment in polyphony. Smith has published four novels since her debut, White Teeth, in 2000, and each one is a departure from the last. Where she varies is in her fiction, and the change is a matter of style. It’s true that Smith is inconsistent, but rarely ideologically, and rarely in her nonfiction. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. ![]()
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