The imaginative literature provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic will be vast. Novels, essays, poems, and memoirs from those fear-filled days are already in the bookstores, and much, much more is coming. Inevitably, once we’re in a position to look back at that corpus, some of it will look rushed, wrong, and even downright opportunistic. I predict Zadie Smith’s slim volume of essays, Intimations, will stand the test of time. Published in mid-2020, these are thoughts from the earliest days of lock-down and quarantine, not some attempt at a sweeping review of the COVID years.

Intimations is a very personal memoir, and from it emerges a portrait of the author as a compassionate, sane, level-headed, and thoughtful human being in a time of dislocation and fear. I can see myself re-reading some or all of these short essays in the future. There is wisdom and humanity in them.