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Swing Time by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99)

“Smith has gone from an unfashionable suburb to conquering literary London, and now New York, where she gets to interview Jay-Z” ©HARRY BORDEN/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES

VS Naipaul knows how hard it is to write fiction in the wake of an early success. His buoyant masterpiece A House for Mr Biswas (1961), drawing on his childhood in Trinidad, came out while he was still in his twenties. The later novels—whatever their virtues—never recaptured that initial comic exuberance. In 2008 Naipaul was asked whether he sympathised with an author in a similar predicament. Zadie Smith’s first novel White Teeth (2000), set in the multicultural north-west London in which she grew up, brimmed with optimism. It was a bestseller that turned her into a literary celebrity at 25. “The problem for someone like that,” said Naipaul of Smith, “is where do you go, how do you move? If you’ve consumed your material in your first book, what do you do? All those stages are full of anguish.”

Smith has a complex—even anguished—relationship with the book that made her name. Nowadays she can’t read White Teeth without, in her own words, being “overwhelmed with nausea.” She needn’t be so repulsed. Smith’s debut was a joyfully assured performance full of jokes (some good, some corny), and propelled by her impressive way with dialogue. It was also, as she is now quick to acknowledge, cartoonish, irritatingly smart-aleck and structurally a bit of a mess, groaning under the influence of Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis. Over the last 16 years, Smith has mused in essays and lectures over how to sharpen her gifts and develop her insights. As she ruefully admitted in the foreword to her 2009 essay collection Changing My Mind, “When you are first published at a young age, your writing grows with you—in public.”

Her second novel, The Autograph Man (2002), tackled a Jewish-Chinese man obsessed with celebrities. Part Saul Bellow, part Lenny Bruce, it had all the energy of White Teeth but little of its charm. On Beauty (2005), as the portentous title indicates, was designed to be Smith’s serious novel. Slavishly structured on Howards End by EM Forster—her fellow King’s College, Cambridge alumnus—and set at a fictional version of Harvard, it chaotically threw…

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