Swing Time

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue and Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7 and Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Character Analysis

The Narrator

The first-person narrator is the protagonist of the novel. She remains unnamed, emphasizing her anxiety about her identity. The narrator grows up in project housing in London with a white father and a Black mother, which complicates her sense of self. The narrator is passionate about movie musicals, inspired by great Black dancers who make manipulation of the body look easy. Her passion for dance helps the narrator escape her present and transcend her complicated relationship with her body.

The narrator is characterized through her relationships with other women, whom she envies, projects her insecurities onto, and carefully studies to understand aspects of femininity. The narrator’s mother, childhood best friend Tracey, and employer Aimee are all strong-willed, fiercely independent women, in contrast to the narrator, who struggles to feel empowered and develop goals and ambitions for herself. Tracey becomes such an aspirational ideal that the narrator has trouble seeing through her invented glamour. Her accomplished and successful mother makes the narrator feel guilty about her lack of direction or ambition. Aimee’s privileged and easy path through the world becomes a crutch, as the narrator forgoes having her own life to work as Aimee’s personal assistant.

Eventually, the narrator’s frequent trips to Gambia as Aimee’s assistant become a formative experience. Though the narrator experiences minority status in London, in Gambia she learns to see the layers of her privilege. The novel’s lonely protagonist makes peace with the expectations of her past and looks forward to the future.

Tracey

Tracey is the narrator’s childhood best friend and a formative female influence. The narrator initially idolizes Tracey, ignoring the warning signs that Tracey’s life is not the glamorous success story Tracey makes it out to be. Only in adulthood does the narrator learn to separate her insecurity-driven projections and see the reality of Tracey’s existence.

Tracey grows up in the same neighborhood as the narrator, and they have an instant connection when they meet at dance class. Tracey is the better dancer, but they’re equally passionate about all things dance. Although like the narrator, Tracey is of Black and white ancestry—Tracey’s mother is white, and her father is Black—Tracey’s home life is quite different than the narrator’s. Because her father has another family and is often incarcerated, Tracey fabricates stories about him to excuse his absences.

Tracey starts to exhibit concerning behavior at an early age, having internalized white society’s harmful stereotypes of Black women. As a pre-teen, she mimics the sexuality of a more mature woman; when male students play a sexually assaultive game in which she is the star, no adults intervene. Instead, Tracey often gets in trouble for not following school rules.

When Tracey is accepted to a theater school, she and the narrator grow apart. Tracey develops a drug addiction, but has moderate success as a dancer on the West End until she has three children by different men and gives up dancing to move back to the project housing in her old neighborhood. Though Tracey’s potential for greatness fades as she commits to single motherhood, Tracey is still an intimidating figure to the narrator. Tracey and the narrator are two sides of the same coin. They challenge one another, inspire one another, and scare one another. The novel ends with an image of pure joy: Tracey dancing with her children, a scene that the narrator can only watch from a distance.

Aimee

Aimee is a world-famous white pop superstar who hires the narrator to be one of her personal assistants. Aimee is confident, enormously ambitious, and has an extreme work ethic. She is also extremely certain about the way the world works—and powerful enough to simply get rid of anyone who disagrees or stands in her way. Aimee’s privilege is so vast that she has a difficult time relating to other people in non-superficial ways.

Aimee becomes yet another woman to whom the narrator sacrifices her power and autonomy, even as she judges and questions the decisions her famous boss makes. Aimee is concerned with image over substance. She uses other people, particularly her ill-conceived school in Gambia and the baby she adopts from the same village—to burnish her public persona. Aimee pretends to care about the narrator, but the narrator is an expendable employee—Aimee is so popular and highly positioned that she could replace the narrator as a personal assistant at any moment. At first, the narrator views Aimee’s privilege and status as foreign, but when a Gambian friend calls both women white, the narrator must confront the reality that being Western is its own form of privilege. When the narrator reclaims a measure of her identity, she reveals the sordid details of Aimee’s dealings to the gossip press to bring the pop star down.

The Narrator’s Mother

Smith dedicates the novel to her own mother, linking her real life to the powerful character she creates in the narrator’s mother. Also unnamed, the narrator’s mother and the narrator live in a world where anonymity and unknowability are valuable.

The narrator’s mother was raised in rural poverty in Jamaica. As an immigrant to London, she works hard to elevate her status in a society dominated by white culture and a history of colonialism. The narrator’s mother is dedicated to her daughter’s intellectual upbringing but leaves the ins-and-outs of the narrator’s care to her father to study political science and sociology. Through steadfast and uncompromising hard work, the narrator’s mother achieves the kind of success she has always valued. She becomes an elected official and activist without giving up her principles, becoming a role model for other Black intellectual women.

As a child, the narrator craves her mother’s full attention. As an adult, the narrator recognizes her mother’s emotional distance as necessary to her mother’s independence. The narrator comes to respect her mother’s drive, though they still struggle to connect on an emotional level. The novel ends with the narrator’s mother’s death from a drawn-out battle with cancer. Without the influence of her mother, the narrator must define who she is and what her future will be on her own.