It has been 16 years since Zadie Smith published White Teeth, becoming, at 24 years old, a standard bearer for contemporary Anglophone fiction. Her fifth novel, Swing Time, comes out Nov. 15. My favorite remains her last one, NW, an ambitious chronicle of four characters from a London council estate, whose lives take dark and difficult turns. Where Smith's debut was marked by its exuberance, bursting with personalities, bursting with vitality, bursting at the seams ("hysterical realism," the critic James Wood called it), NW showed a mature stylist, all sinewy precision. Smith had made her name delivering lush, abundant prose to rapt audiences, but it turned out she could drop the charm and deliver even more.
As Smith's first novel written in the first person, Swing Time, too, marks a…
