Zadie Smith on Populists, Frauds and Flip Phones

Sometimes you stumble across a line in a book and think, “Yeah, that’s exactly how that feels.” I had that moment reading the introduction to Zadie Smith’s 2018 book of essays,
“Feel Free.” She’s talking about the political stakes of that period — Brexit in Britain, Donald Trump here — and the way you could feel it changing people.

She writes: “Millions of more or less amorphous selves will now necessarily find themselves solidifying into protesters, activists, marchers, voters, firebrands, impeachers, lobbyists, soldiers, champions, defenders, historians, experts, critics. You can’t fight fire with air. But equally you can’t fight for a freedom you’ve forgotten how to identify.”

What Smith is describing felt so familiar. I see it so often in myself and people around me. And yet you rarely hear it talked about — that moment when politics feels like it demands we put aside our internal conflict, our uncertainty, and solidify ourselves into what the cause or the moment needs us to be, as if curiosity were a luxury or a decadence suited only to peacetime.

Smith is a novelist and an essayist; she’s been one of my favorite writers for years. If you’ve not read her back catalog, “White Teeth” and “On Beauty” and “Swing Time,” I almost envy you. But still, I was surprised when I finally read “The Fraud,” the book she released last year. I didn’t expect this novel about a trial in 19th-century London to be so resonant with 21st-century America. But Smith has said Trump and populism were front of mind when she wrote it, and you can feel it in the book, as she explores the Tichborne trial, based on a real, very strange case in which a man who seemed to be a clear fraud claimed to be the heir to a storied estate, and built a huge movement of passionate supporters who utterly flummoxed the day’s elites. Smith has moved to another time and another place to protect the ability to have that amorphous self, to explore something current from more perspectives than the current moment sometimes allows.

Smith joined me for a conversation on my podcast. This is an edited transcript of part of our conversation. For the full conversation, listen to “The Ezra Klein Show.” Please note this episode contains strong language.