Their friendship and fated falling out is the stuff of tragedy in the classical sense our narrator muses, “there was always this mutual awareness, an invisible band strung between us, connecting us and preventing us from straying too deeply into relations with others.” Tracey is, indeed, the narrator’s sole object of obsession, one she returns to at varying points, often by way of other characters, illustrating their karmic inseparability-a lodestar by which she tracks her own success or failure. When we meet Tracey in the book’s opening, she’s another mixed-race girl whom the unnamed narrator has dance class with. Relationships, and the action that subsequently alters them, form the novel’s backbone, cementing the nonlinear action nicely. What could have been off-putting proves to be an adventure zig-zagging from public housing to brownstones, from England to Senegal, from 1982 to 2008, filling in the gaps in time and place and creating a definitive arc, albeit one completely warped. If it weren’t for the prologue in Zadie Smith’s new novel, Swing Time (464 pages Penguin Press), a reader might be confounded by the many undulations the narrative takes as it kicks off in the present then looks back upon a past traumatic incident, excavating it.
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