At one point, she tells us that she writes “because… well, the best I can say for it is it’s a psychological quirk of mine developed in response to whatever personal failings I have” perhaps it might “provide some form of pleasure to serious people, doing actual jobs”. She guiltily reports on small talk about snow-day school closures with her regular masseur in Manhattan, who “allows me to complain with him… As if for me not writing for a day matters economically, personally, existentially, practically or in any way whatsoever”.

Smith’s sense of herself as fortunate nags her throughout the book. Smith probes the obligation she feels to point out that she's 'lucky compared to so many others, but not suffering' She’s appealingly candid: when a neighbour tells her: “We’ll get through this, all of us, together”, she whispers: “‘Yes, we will’, hardly audible, even to myself” while walking on, the truth hanging in the air that she’s about to skip town.

One piece begins by describing her ATM dash while packing up to take her family to a friend’s empty cottage upstate en route to London before the flights are grounded. She’s more engaging in the glimpses of day-to-day life under the new normal: pressing a lift button through her sleeve in the early days of the pandemic or feeling self-conscious talking to her mum on Zoom. Smith’s loftier mode (“America has rarely been philosophically inclined to consider existence as a whole”) tends to feel less convincing, not least when, discussing a writer’s need forĬontrol, she muses on her attraction to tulips prior to “this strange and overwhelming season of death”. What one calls the moment “just before the global shit hit the fan”, another calls “a few days before the global humbling began”. Meditations on what the pandemic has done for creativity or political commentary on how the US could look to postwar Britain under Clement Attlee feel less essential than more rhetorically adventurous items there’s a strangely moving list of personal influences (family, Muhammad Ali, “contingency”) that constitutes a kind of kaleidoscopic selfie and an essay that riffs on coronavirus as a metaphor for racism, comparing – in passing – Dominic Cummings’s eyes to those of Derek Chauvin as he knelt on George Floyd.

That’s rarely the case in her new book, Intimations, a shape-shifting series of essays reflecting on life in a time of Covid-19, in which she left New York for lockdown in London, writing in “those scraps of time the year… has allowed”. I n Zadie Smith’s previous book, the experimental story collection Grand Union, the most interesting items also happened to be the least unconventional.

Intimations book