At the beginning stands Tracey, a fellow child of the estates whom the narrator meets in dance class. Memories of four women-her mother, Aimee, and two friends, Tracey and Hawa-mark the path from her past to her present. The story of self that follows is told through stories of others, as befits a shadow.

I experienced myself as a kind of shadow. A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I saw all my years at once, but they were not piled up on each other, experience after experience, building into something of substance-the opposite. One afternoon, she leaves the condo and goes to a lecture, where a clip from the Fred Astaire musical Swing Time plays. In the muted solitude of her upscale padded cell (“neutral, with all significant corners rounded, like an iPhone”), the narrator is left to reflect and, possibly, repent.

She has been fired, for reasons undisclosed, from her position as the longtime personal assistant to an age-defying pop star named Aimee, this fictional universe’s Madonna. In a prologue set in 2008, the narrator finds herself holed up in a condo, disgraced and out of a job. But strict autobiographical resemblance ends there.

Swing Time tells the story of an unnamed narrator, cut in the rough shape of the author: a woman born and raised in the public-housing estates in Northwest London in the 1970s and ’80s, the child of a black mother and a white father. Swing Time, her latest, is rooted in the first person-a new turn in Smith’s novels. Four years later, she has changed her mind again.

Told in three styles, each for a different character’s consciousness, it embodied Smith’s belief that “flexibility of voice leads to a flexibility in all things,” an idea she once expressed in a speech about Barack Obama and code-switching. White Teeth, a Dickensian whirlwind of third-person omniscience, was the poster child for a turn-of-the-century genre the critic James Wood called “hysterical realism.” Her fourth novel, NW (2012), was a concise experiment in polyphony. Smith has published four novels since her debut, White Teeth, in 2000, and each one is a departure from the last. Where she varies is in her fiction, and the change is a matter of style. It’s true that Smith is inconsistent, but rarely ideologically, and rarely in her nonfiction. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

Swing time review