“... Smith tries out here, the seemingly non-fictional sort seen in the novels of Ben Lerner and Sheila Heti, and in Smith’s own essays. As the title On Beauty had been already used by Elaine Scarry, so Swing Time has been borrowed from the title of the 1936 Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers vehicle, a black and white musical of waltzes and tap dances and a ...”

“... here not as a discrete, describable entity but as a kind of wave function. In her novel of 2010, Sheila Heti asked ‘How should a person be?’ Bennett asks something different: what is a person? Why and how might a person seek to undo herself? And, crucially, what then? Perhaps a person is best approached as an element in a ‘situation’. Hence the ...”