But Local.

I enjoyed all of Edward Mendelson’s NYRB review (archived) of Zadie Smith’s play The Wife of Willesden (a riff on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath); here I will excerpt a section on a topic dear to my heart, the importance of a clear personal voice in any literary writing: The play’s comic and transhistorical virtuosity arises in part from a half-concealed argument—which Smith makes everywhere in her work—about the moral significance of a personal voice. “From the moment Alyson opens her mouth” in The Canterbury Tales, Smith recalls in her introduction, I knew that she was speaking to me, and that she was a Kilburn girl at heart…. Alyson’s voice—brash, honest, cheeky, salacious, outrageous, unapologetic—is one I’ve heard and loved all my life: in the flats, at school, in the playgrounds of my childhood and then the pubs of my maturity, at bus stops, in shops, and of course up and down the Kilburn High Road, any day of the week. The words may be different but the spirit is the same. Like…