Swing Time is the story of two girls growing up in 1980’s London, each fascinated by the world of dance, but ultimately taking very different paths through it. The unnamed narrator winds up, more or less by happenstance, as the assistant to an international pop star named Aimee. Her friend Tracey struggles to make it as a professional actress, eventually accepting a string of bit parts in one musical or another.

Probably the pivotal scene in the book is the one in which the narrator and her friend spend hours watching the movie Swing Time, because they want to watch Fred Astaire dancing in the “Bojangles of Harmlem” sequence. This scene is set during the 80s, so they’re watching the movie on VHS, and they need to rewind and fast forward, over and over again, in order to watch the sequence repeatedly. This scene mimics in miniature the structure of the book, which fast forwards and rewinds over various periods on the girls’ lives. The more we go back and furth, the blurrier the quality of the metaphorical tape - that is, the less certain we are of what actually happened, and who was, or wasn’t, in the wrong. It’s a very clever device.

And that is how we bounce between the narrator’s childhood, and her happenstance employment as an assistant to one of the world’s most recognizable pop stars, and her part in an international development scheme gone wrong… and her friend’s success in dance school, and brush with drugs, and long struggle towards stardom, and eventual settling down with a small brood of children. It all feels a bit like one big run-on sentence, with motifs that recur in one way or another - perhaps a bit like a dance sequence in a musical.

I think the idea is that Tracey is supposed to be the talented dancer, while the narrator is supposed to be the theoretician, the one who understands dance but can’t quite pull it off. And furthermore, the idea is that both characters are failures, measured by their own visions of success, and their respective mothers’. That idea doesn’t get quite fully fleshed out, I think in large part because while the narrator is clearly quite bright, she is nevertheless rather aimless, and it’s difficult to see what, precisely, her ambitions are.

I’m generally a big fan of Zadie Smith’s books, and can’t recommend them enough. And while On Beauty, White Teeth, and Autograph Man each seemed to conclude on a sharp point, the characters more or less in the wreck of all that they had learned.. this one comes across as a bit more cheesy. For all that it’s obsessed with the tradition of heterodox thought and unconventional lifestyles, it winds up more or less reifying some very conventional ideas about the best way to achieve a happy life. It’s certainly a fascinating investigation of the world of dance in literary form, and I recommend it - but I found this book to be merely brilliant, in comparison to Smith’s previous ground-breaking works.