Swing Time

Smith became famous, fast, for the precocious pyrotechnics of her debut novel, White Teeth, but this novel, her fifth, is her quietest and most patient, perhaps because it is all filtered through a single consciousness, instead of her usual multitude. Her Fred Astaire-besotted narrator is (or once was) a dancer (not a very good one) whose life seems to span two great and doomed friendships, one with a fellow mixed-race girl in the racial mix of northwest London and one with a global pop star. The plot almost seems beside the point; the book's many pleasures come from Smith's graceful, insightful observations, which unsettle and complicate themselves—and the characters they describe—in the way only fiction can.