Zadie Smith reviews 'The Social Network'

Celebrated as a novelist, Zadie Smith is less well known as a literary journalist and cultural analyst, but really, in those subsidiary fields, she deserves to be more well known than almost anybody. Written for the New York Review of Books, her long review of the movie The Social Network is a case in point. Zadie Smith was a Harvard student at the same time as the movie’s nominal subject, Mark Zuckerberg, but she starts off the piece by disclaiming any special qualifications or knowledge. You would think she knew nothing at all about Facebook or the electronic world in general. Actually she is pulling a hustle. The hustler’s standard technique is to get the expectations down as low as possible before unleashing his prowess. Having suitably prepared the unsuspecting reader, Zadie Smith begins gradually but inexorably to prove that she has all the qualifications that could be wished. Her first weapon is a driving prose rhythm, always close to the conversational but never prone to the redundancies of speech. “If it’s a three-act movie, it’s because Zuckerberg screws over more people than a two-act movie can comfortably hold.” Such things are often thought of, but seldom written so neatly, and almost never written as if they had been spoken.