More on Zadie Smith

A quick caveat, it may be that the Slate author is reading Smith wrong, projecting their own concerns onto her.

If not, however, this is really telling:

One of Smith's most lucid essays pits Nabokov's reading style (based on the idea of the author's absolute control) against Roland Barthes' famous "death of the author" theory (that meaning is created in the act of reading, independent of the author's wishes). The appeal of each approach is clear at once. Smith loved Barthes' reader empowerment as a theory-minded college student, she says; as a fiction writer trying to communicate with readers, though, she favors Nabokov. Both perspectives reflect reading at its most educated and refined. Both are clearly very useful. And yet, try as she might, Smith cannot get the two to join together. They're basically irreconcilable.

The first thing that jumps out at me is how terribly old all this is. Didn't Sir Phillip Sidney do this stuff to death 430 years ago now.

Except, of course, Sidney had considerably more ambition. He thought poetry might improve its readers. Smith, at least in the above account is, "a fiction writer trying to communicate with readers".

Another way to think about it is that Zadie Smith is an immensely privileged person who, by luck or talent, has acquired a large audience willing to read her works and apparently thinks this is reason to not only spend her time navel gazing but also expects that the rest of us should care about her navel gazing.