Too bad I left White Teeth on a plane last summer and never finished it because I saw Zadie Smith at a reading in Central Park this summer and think she's pretty amazing. Instead of reading from The Autograph Man she opted to read instead the essay she wrote as prologue for the next installment of America's Best Non-Required Reading (whose annoying qualities I won't delve into in detail here.)

She spoke profusely about the immense and scary weight of the Western Literary Canon, for those who prioritize it over new or experimental fiction. She said that indeed, for a long time she would read Daniel DeFoe over Martin Amis just because she thought she should. But she's branched out, and is a happier person in the end. Good for Zadie. I would argue that reading Money or the latest J.T. Leroy may present a different tendency of masochism, but I got what she was saying.

She also spoke about the way writers read, and what she said makes sense for anyone who wants to create anything, that if you are paralyzed by your fear of either a) Not wanting to be as bad as the bad things you read, or b) are so intimidated by the good things that you think you won't ever compete, you'll never get anywhere. I guess these are obvious points, but for me it was comforting that someone who was so successful at such a young age had these anxieties...

Anyway, her new book (as described on The Believer's website) sounds like it will prove highly interesting. I'm curious how aesthetic failures will be presented as ethical failures -- I'm not sure I agree but I'm also not sure I understand. And in spite of her words in Central Park she still seems slightly caught up in the "shoulds" of reading and writing:

"My desk is covered with school work. I'm taking a class on Jane Austen and Henry James, and a class on literary theory. In between I'm writing a book of essays on the novel. The subtitle of the book is "Essays on Fiction and Failure"; the essays are concerned with the ethical impulse in fiction as I find it expressed in the 20th century novel. At the moment I'm working on the introduction and the first chapter. That's about E.M. Forster. Basically, the book is a very gentle exploration of a suggestion of Iris Murdoch's: That the literary impulse and the impulse towards the Good fail and succeed along similar lines. It's an old fashioned book in that way; it suggests that elements of a novel that we would describe as aesthetic failures are actually ethical failures also. Some of the other writers in the collection are Kafka, Zora Neale Hurston, Updike, Vonnegut, Salinger, Kingsley Amis, David Foster Wallace. And there's one poet in there as sort of epilogue—Philip Larkin. I made a decision to only work on the writers I love. There comes a point where it becomes exhausting to continue pretending that A Room With a View is not your favorite novel."