{"id":9892,"date":"2013-08-05T11:44:34","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T15:44:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=9892"},"modified":"2013-08-05T11:44:34","modified_gmt":"2013-08-05T15:44:34","slug":"zadie-smith-meet-the-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2013\/08\/05\/zadie-smith-meet-the-president\/","title":{"rendered":"Zadie Smith: “Meet the President!”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here<\/a> to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0webpage. Zadie Smith’s \u201cMeet the President!\u201d was originally published in the\u00a0August 12 & 19, 2013 issue of The New Yorker<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Click<\/a>
Click for a larger image.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Betsy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Zadie Smith\u2019s \u201cMeet the President!\u201d is fitted with one visual after another, as if trying to sell its movie rights: boy on a pier; boy approached by old crone and \u201cstunted\u201d little girl, boy seen as having a green light encircling his head like a halo, boy outfitting himself with virtual breasts, and boy living in two simultaneous realities —\u00a0one, the natural reality where he walks along a beach, and the other, a gaming reality where he kills people.<\/p>\n

The story is also casually fitted to the brim with ideas about our future: the effects of global warming (such as \u201ctropical Scotland,\u201d global flooding, and the flight from England by anyone who can), the effects of government gone mad (such as the casual elimination of ordinary\u00a0 citizens), the effects of globalization (such as the boy having no sense of his English heritage or identity), the effects of believing there is only one way to see things (such as being enrolled in a school at six months), and the stunted emotional evolution of the future\u2019s elite (such that while you can \u201cread\u201d a person\u2019s DNA at a glance, you may have never grieved over the dead body of a relative).<\/p>\n

The population in this future world is divided into the electronically rich haves and the \u201cstunted\u201d provincial have-nots.\u00a0The have-nots are the kind of people who still attend funerals, while the haves are the kind that mindlessly murder people by governmental drone. Scotland as the new Pakistan.<\/p>\n

The story is imagined in the time it takes a fifteen-year-old boy to guide a child from the beach to the ruins of an old church where a funeral is taking place. All the while he is walking the child to the church, the boy is simultaneously playing a virtual game in which he must murder people in order to \u201cmeet the president.\u201d<\/p>\n

For all his gadgetry, the boy has an emotional evolution of a bully-boy, a thug. At the funeral, he is annoyed by the primitive nature of the people\u2019s grief:<\/p>\n

Then, cutting across it all like a stick through the sand, a child\u2019s voice wailed, an acute, high-pitched sound, such animal makes when, out of sheer boredom, you break its leg.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This sentence perfectly expresses Smith\u2019s fear: that we already live in a world where boys never become men, and where, from afar and without a hearing, governments already kill their own citizens.<\/p>\n

But the story doesn\u2019t really ever come alive. It illustrates the difficulty of writing about the dead future: if the story-telling is too freighted with fearsome ideas, the fearsome ideas strangle the story-telling. This feels more like the subject of a novel, and yet if this were a pr\u00e9cis for a novel, it\u2019s a novel I would skip.<\/p>\n

The problem the story has for me is this: the so-dead boy and the so-dead waste-land he inhabits appear to allow no room for hope. That makes no room for this reader. But perhaps the apocalyptic dystopia is not my particular cup of tea. For me, The New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s previous Zadie Smith story (\u201cThe Embassy of Cambodia\u201d) was a hit; this one is a miss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker\u00a0webpage. Zadie Smith’s \u201cMeet the President!\u201d was originally published in the\u00a0August 12 & 19, 2013 issue of The New Yorker. Betsy Zadie Smith\u2019s \u201cMeet the President!\u201d is fitted with one visual after another, as if trying to sell its movie rights: boy on … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[94,340],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-9892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-yorker-fiction","category-zadie-smith"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-2zy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9892"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9896,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9892\/revisions\/9896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9892"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=9892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}