Perhaps, when this pandemic is over, we will remember it in stages. The before times, of course, then the early days. Then the thick of it, and finally, if we’re lucky, it may someday end. When looking back upon this pandemic, we may think of what it has produced. Zadie Smith’s collection of essays from the early days will certainly be remembered. In her latest book, “Intimations: Six Essays,” the endlessly insightful English author provides nothing short of a historical record, one of the best documentations of life in the pandemic thus far. 

Smith writes of pandemic-phenomena on several scales. She writes of banana bread. She writes of writing. She writes of love. These seemingly smaller things are brought to life by her writing. She does not glorify them, though; her keen eye simply describes them for what they are in this bizarre time — what she calls “the global humbling.”

In the book’s first essay, “Peonies,” Smith is blunt about how “writing is control.” Smith is not only an essayist, novelist and a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, but also a tenured professor at New York University. Needless to say, the woman knows how to write. Yet her take on the art of writing is distilled into an incredibly succinct, three-word sentence. This is Smith’s brilliance in its most beautifully straightforward form. But her humor is not far behind, as Smith writes, “The part of the university in which I teach should be called the Controlling Experience Department.”

“Intimations” addresses not only Smith’s personal routines, but also her thoughts on the state of the nation. Smith was born and raised in England, but she lives in the United States. Her expat status complements her intellect, making her political and social commentary doubly outstanding. 

In her essay “The American Exception,” which appeared in The New Yorker in April, Smith’s opening line is a harrowing reminder of who is currently leading our country. “He speaks truth so rarely that when you hear it from his own mouth,” she writes, “it has the force of revelation.” That sentence alone could surely run a chill down the spines of countless Americans, as does the analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic that Smith goes on to provide. She writes of how, in March, our president said about the before times that, “we didn’t have death.” 

Smith writes of how Trump implied that viruses have a  “democratic nature”and impact all people equally. This myth has been struck down quite thoroughly by pandemic journalism; the New York Times reported on how COVID-19 affects Americans of color disproportionately, for example. We now know that pandemics don’t affect everyone equally, and that Trump’s statement was false. But, “American hierarchies, hundreds of years in the making,” Smith says, “are not so easily overturned.” 

Smith begins with this implicit allusion to the ongoing fight to end racism in America. She then moves gradually toward addressing it explicitly, setting the stage for the book’s penultimate essay, in which she writes about the murder of George Floyd, and about American racism as a virus. “Patient zero of this particular virus stood on a slave ship four hundred years ago.” Smith’s bluntness remains, and this piece is by far the book’s most important. 

She writes how racism “is lodged as firmly in blue hearts as it is in red.” Smith’s analysis becomes even more timely when she writes of White people who are “very happy to ‘blackout’ their social media” for a day, as long as their “education does not occur in the form of actual black children attending their actual schools.” Smith writes vividly of disparities in education, detailing how she hopes that after the virus there will “no longer be those who are taught Latin and those who are barely taught to read.”

This specific essay – a vivid reminder of what our country is dealing with – is intense to read, let alone to reflect upon. But the reflection it induces could hardly be more necessary. Smith’s writings serve as a snapshot of the current embodiments of American racism, a necessary document not only now, but also for the future. In order for that future to exist as any semblance of calm, we must begin this reflection now.