Zadie Smith is usually amazing. I saw her speak once. She signed my paperback copy of White Teeth that somehow got sent on permanent loan to a former neighbor. I loved that book: a portrait of families in England, one like hers (Jamaican/British) and one Muslim-British. Now she is back writing about these identity concepts is ways that make the imagination sparkle just reading.
"The conclusions Obama draws from his own Pygmalion experience, however, are subtler than Shaw's. The tale he tells is not the old tragedy of gaining a new, false voice at the expense of a true one. The tale he tells is all about addition. His is the story of a genuinely many-voiced man. If it has a moral it is that each man must be true to his selves, plural."
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