Essay collections gather a writer’s thoughts over time and can be read as an oblique form of memoir, one in which the self is revealed through a series of conversations with the world.

Two new collections by celebrated novelists – Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive and Anne Enright’s Attention: Writing on Life, Art and the World – tell the stories of our time from within the unfolding cultural moment. The essay, as it appears in these collections, is a response to minds, art, communities and culture, understood through a writer’s body, intellect and being.

Different sensibilities are at work in these collections, but a quotation from each might give an overall sense of the mode. Smith writes:

the people we tend to call geniuses are in reality always in communication with other minds, other artists, their own communities and the culture at large.

Enright, writing on Helen Garner’s diaries, notes something Garner’s former husband “V” said of her:

You think things right through, by prisming them through yourself.

Smith has been famous since the publication in 2000 of White Teeth, her dazzling novel of multicultural London, but she has become known as a public intellectual as well as a novelist. She is a prolific essayist. Dead and Alive draws on the past decade, during which she has published two other collections: Intimations and Feel Free.

In her foreword, Smith writes that her essays often emerge from an encounter. This might be with art, film, politics, urban life, history (particularly Black history), literature or writers themselves. The collection includes obituaries for the likes of Toni Morrison, Hilary Mantel and Martin Amis.

These encounters are of their time. “This book cannot scrub its history as the ground shifts beneath it,” Smith writes. “It is not being written by an infinite and eternally unscrolling artificial intelligence, but by a human being in a particular moment.”

Smith is concerned with real people, real intelligence, language formed by experience, and communication with others through writing and reading. Certain terms and themes recur: the crucial and continually eroded space of the commons; freedom in reading, writing and life; language as container and tool, and sometimes as a “battlefield”; and a continual negotiation of self in relation to the larger culture. Thoughts on the predations of the internet and AI work their way through many of these essays.

For Smith, the essay is an important site of the “commons”, originally the place where different interest groups came together to resist the enclosure of open land. As with this earlier space of resistance, it provides a forum in which one might tap into what she calls “solidarity in alterity”.

“Essaying,” Smith wrote recently in the New Yorker, is “a stumbling attempt to recreate, in language, a common space, one that is open to all.”

This tension between difference and togetherness is central to Smith’s essays, particularly in those about the act of writing itself. In a much-discussed essay from 2019, Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction, she explores the idea of cultural appropriation in fiction. At the time, it was a hot and divisive topic. It is still simmering away in many a........

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