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Swing Time is a story of identity, stereotype, expectation and self-destruction. Smith sets up two biracial girls raised in similar circumstances by very different parents and then follows them from girlhood and into their 30's. They start off mostly on an even playing field, but over the course of the novel, we realize that the parts that they play in their lives are as self-created as anything else and that, in the end, they turn out to be their own worse enemy.
The unnamed narrator, our primary protagonist, is ever in tension with her purported BFF, Tracy. Even when Tracy isn't around, it's like some kind of weird competition. Tracy is obviously the shadow self, the Id and their connection over the years was an oddity to me. This is a book populated with unlikable characters: from the self-reverentially blind protagonist, damaged Tracy, privileged popstar Amy and the protagonist's ambitious and intellectual mother. Everyone in Swing Time is selfish and that made the book a really hard sell for me.
The smallness of the story challenged my interest in the larger themes: colonialism, humanitarian aid, celebrity culture, the nature of friendship and motherhood. Everyone is just so small that the overall story gets ratcheted down into the petty. Humanitarian aid becomes a form of colonialism, jobs are all about ego, and sex and love become all about revenge. There are interesting commentaries on the West's insistence on "saving" people in the "Third World" whether they ask them to or not; the tension in mother/daughter relationships and the collision between the maternal and individual identities, as well as the the tension between tradition and modernity. But that only got me so far. I was perpetually baffled by the kinds of choices that the narrator made. I realize that I like books in which people are generally trying to be better people. Swing Time, similar to Girl on a Train, revolved around people struggling and wallowing in the small morass of their own failures. They were, none of them, all that interested in being better except in the most superficial ways and, I think, that was the point.
I wish that I had liked Seeing Time better. Possibly, the nature of the book is not best suited for an audiobook. There were times were I lost track of the narrative because of the constant shifts in between present and different moments of the past. And because of how messy the characters were as a whole, I lost interest in them about half way through the novel and struggled to care about who they were and what would ultimately happen to them.
The unnamed narrator, our primary protagonist, is ever in tension with her purported BFF, Tracy. Even when Tracy isn't around, it's like some kind of weird competition. Tracy is obviously the shadow self, the Id and their connection over the years was an oddity to me. This is a book populated with unlikable characters: from the self-reverentially blind protagonist, damaged Tracy, privileged popstar Amy and the protagonist's ambitious and intellectual mother. Everyone in Swing Time is selfish and that made the book a really hard sell for me.
The smallness of the story challenged my interest in the larger themes: colonialism, humanitarian aid, celebrity culture, the nature of friendship and motherhood. Everyone is just so small that the overall story gets ratcheted down into the petty. Humanitarian aid becomes a form of colonialism, jobs are all about ego, and sex and love become all about revenge. There are interesting commentaries on the West's insistence on "saving" people in the "Third World" whether they ask them to or not; the tension in mother/daughter relationships and the collision between the maternal and individual identities, as well as the the tension between tradition and modernity. But that only got me so far. I was perpetually baffled by the kinds of choices that the narrator made. I realize that I like books in which people are generally trying to be better people. Swing Time, similar to Girl on a Train, revolved around people struggling and wallowing in the small morass of their own failures. They were, none of them, all that interested in being better except in the most superficial ways and, I think, that was the point.
I wish that I had liked Seeing Time better. Possibly, the nature of the book is not best suited for an audiobook. There were times were I lost track of the narrative because of the constant shifts in between present and different moments of the past. And because of how messy the characters were as a whole, I lost interest in them about half way through the novel and struggled to care about who they were and what would ultimately happen to them.
