With an entire half of a year of good reads and even better meetings behind us, Riveter’s book club met this week for our December’s gathering on Zadie Smith’s latest novel.
by Anna Meyer
6 months ago, The Riveter’s Minneapolis book club kicked off with Sloane Crosley’s The Clasp and we had our first book club event at Anthropologie West End. We wanted to create an event to bring readers together and fictional characters to life through conversation and styling, but in the past couple months, we’ve found that our group has grown into something that accomplishes more than what we initially set out to do. The Riveter’s book club has brought together a small community of readers, writers, bloggers and stylists that get to come together to discuss important topics that are explored in our monthly reads and daily lives.
For the last read of 2016, we dove into Zadie Smith’s most recent novel, Swing Time. The book takes you through the life of a woman who, as we discussed at our gathering, is the main character of the novel but not necessarily the main character in her own life. We are shown her evolution of relationships ranging from her childhood friend to her boss as an adult and the way that these individuals have impacted the narrator in her decisions, attitude and outlook in life. But this book discusses so many layers of social issues in its 400 pages or so that it’s hard to summarize how densely packed Smith’s writing is with gender, race, political and class topics. How does an absence of a parental figure affect children? What happens when two friends want to achieve their similar dreams, but only one has the talent to do so? How does education isolate us, but sometimes propel us forward in different ways? Smith tackles these questions and more, and left us with a lot to talk about as a group.
As we talked, you could feel the focus and sincerity that each reader had in how they listened to whomever was speaking and stirring ideas, and the thoughtful way that ideas were built upon one another. While sitting amongst the group sipping on hot cocoa and keeping warm from the Minnesota winter, conversations exceeded how the novel was enjoyed and ventured into what the novel truly meant for everyone present.
Even as we began talking about the style of the characters in Swing Time and how they were described, the focus wasn’t lost, especially as we discussed an important point that Smith said herself in her interview with Nylon magazine. When asked if she believes fashion is under represented in fashion, Smith disagreed and pointed out how women writers usually handle writing about clothing in novels.
“Not in women’s writing. If you read Woolf, she’ll go 10 rounds over a hat, scarf, or dress. And in her diaries she’d recount taking a check directly from wherever she’d just been paid straight to the dress shop. In Britain, there’s a kind of morality about it, like we should not get dressed at all. But the logic behind that is fascinating, because it’s implicitly misogynistic to suggest that a woman who is beautifully dressed doesn’t need her brain—there’s no other purpose to having a brain for women unless you can’t get anything any other way. I completely submitted to that logic when I was a young woman. I really felt that there were beautiful women who were idiotic. Beauty was a compensation for idiocy, and I was a serious person.
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Beauty and intelligence are not mutually exclusive, and we prove this when we discuss style and literature in the same conversation every month.
Looking forward, our first pick of 2017 will be The Wangs vs. The World by Jade Chang. If you’d like to attend, or if you’re interested in learning more information about The Riveter‘s book club series with Anthropologie, email WestEndMinnPS@anthropologie.com.
Anna Meyer is The Riveter’s Editorial Brand Assistant. She is a Minneapolis native currently pursuing journalism and English at the University of Kansas. Her brain works best in the morning, when she’ll usually play Tears for Fears through her earbuds, sitting on the floor surrounded by her notebooks filled with scribbled ideas. Follow her on Instagram and stay updated with her work via her personal website.