Filled with Smith’s crisp observations, Dead and Alive is a smart, somber book informed by a sharp right turn in politics and a great deal of anxiety about how we look at and talk about art ... Rarely do her analyses surprise me, but there’s pleasure in watching a novelist wired to see all sides at once wrangle with her own dynamic subjectivity; what’s compelling is the effort of eliciting in herself the most honest possible take. As in her previous essay collections, some of the best moments in Dead and Alive are found in her more personal and elegiac writings.
Smith is arguing for the necessity of vigorous criticism and often makes her case. The book’s finest pieces wrangle, in elegant prose, with humanity’s contradictions; the weaker ones indulge in name-dropping, footnotes and op-ed invective ... Her forays into social commentary are more problematic. She’s strong on the weird population kink known as Gen X ... She’s persuasive when she remains within her comfort zone, opining on race, gender and, occasionally, class. Not so much when she ventures into technology ... She comes across as preaching to her peers rather than seeking converts, a whiff of Oxbridge elitism ... Does what it was designed to do: It gathers the author’s criticism, literary obituaries, a university address and an interview with a Spanish journal between two covers. The execution falters. Smith’s provocations are often stunning; her prose is thrillingly strident; but her fiction better captures the messiness of public and private selves at war with each other.
She certainly makes essays look easy ... Some delightful personal pieces ... Some essays do work better than others; there are forewords to history books that are less enjoyable without access to the book in question, for instance ... They are a delicious peek behind the scenes of a great writer at work — or at play.
Has a ragbag quality. Smith seems aware of this ... A book that does not operate with the confident uncertainty of Smith’s best essays, but instead is corroded throughout by a much deeper set of uncertainties ... Smith’s writing...has become increasingly distorted.
There is...something of the afterlife about the material gathered in her new book, which bundles various odds and ends from the past nine years ... Many of her flirtations with the vernacular are prefaced by awkward, vaguely apologetic disclaimers ... The cumulative effect is a little embarrassing ... There are upsides to being slightly out of touch. One is that you feel less obligated to pay lip service to the reductive pieties that grease the wheels of cultural commentary ... Smith’s positions on the politics of creativity are beyond reproach, albeit commonsensical – amounting, essentially, to a caution against overcorrection and incuriosity. When it comes to actual politics, she is less assured ... It’s as though Smith can’t quite decide if she’s a bien pensant pragmatist or an idealistic dreamer. In this respect she’s perhaps no different to many thousands of ambivalent liberal-ish voters.
Her fourth collection contains 30 penetrating, nimble, witty, and affecting pieces, most from the past half-dozen years ... A treasury of candid, thoughtful, caring, and exhilarating inquires.
I found compassion, interrogation and answers. This is Smith’s most consequential publication in years, and I say that as a longtime fan of both her essays and novels ... In Dead and Alive, Smith returns to essay-writing with a hammer.
