Or this: “The wigs on Key & Peele are the hardest-working hairpieces in show business.”

We are also generously supplied with pithy, quotable lines on a huge range of topics, such as this: “Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly bodies.” But Prince, precious, elusive Prince, well, there lays one whose name was writ in water”), or an essay contrasting the works and ideas of Justin Bieber and Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. But we also get odder things, such as Smith’s ruminations on various famous dancers (“People will be dancing like Michael Jackson until the end of time. Apparently I look like the fish-sandwich type”), and selections from her short-lived Harper’s book column (“I had a four-month-old baby and a misplaced idea of maternal bravado. We get straightforward hackwork, such as her New York Times profile of Jay Z (“He likes to order for people. Like Smith’s previous collection, 2009’s Changing My Mind, her new book is a mix of memoir, criticism, and journalism-for-hire. Feel Free, her new collection of essays, is filled with the sights and sounds of a highly intelligent writer thinking things through on the fly. John Updike, who produced a half-dozen cheerfully obese volumes of non-fiction in his lifetime, often with expectation-lowering titles such as Hugging the Shore and Odd Jobs, was the consummate literary hitchhiker. They are the writers who, in the anxious gaps between their “real” books, decide to sweep together every occasional essay, travel piece, review, speech and recipe they can find and call it a collection.

In contrast, hitchhikers visit a topic on assignment or by choice, gobble all the details and colour they need for a few thousands words, and depart, often never to return. Whatever other creative things they do, these are people whose hearts and brains are wired for non-fiction. Diggers feel most at home in the essay form. Essay collections fall into two broad categories: those written by diggers, and those written by hitchhikers.ĭiggers burrow into a topic or a theme, over and over, eager to explore uncharted depths, uncover new truths and exhaust themselves in the pursuit.

Zadie smith feel free review