Booth had never laid a hand on me or on Tracey, nor anyone else, as far as I knew.One of the advantages of being a writer over a musician is that, for the most part, writers are expected to produce more interesting work as they grow older while music is really a young person’s game. Booth had been inappropriate, made directly to the dance teacher after Tracey was accused of stealing the cashboxes from a student show, is not only dismissed out of hand, but it’s clear that one friend worked hard to convince adults in charge to believe the teacher instead: “I made it as clear as I could that Mr. The narrator vaguely disregards all of her friend’s claims, from a very early age later, she’s horrified to hear that she’s sent “distressing emails” to such people as “ director at the Tricycle who had not cast her, she thought, because of color.” The accusation that Mr. Booth, touched her inappropriately next a still-more shocking one about the narrator’s beloved father ― and then paranoia, rage, erratic behavior. What happens to Tracey, and to her friendship with the narrator? From the vantage point we’re given, it’s basically insanity ― a couple wild accusations from Tracey first that their dance school piano player, an elderly man named Mr. “This, too, was an example of bad taste.” “It turned out ― as my mother had guessed at once ― that there was no ‘Tracey’s father,’ at least not in the conventional, married sense,” writes Smith. While her husband, the narrator’s father, is a loving family man, he’s also relatively content with an unambitious life, while she’s beautiful, restrained, determined to act like any educated middle-class woman would ― and disdainful of Tracey’s mother, an overweight white woman with gaudy taste and no apparent goals except to get on disability. The narrator’s mother is from Jamaica and has aspirations to middle-class acceptance, educational achievement and a career in line with her interests in political activism. Both are biracial, the child of one black parent and one white both are clinging to their mothers both are intrigued by each other, though not immediately friends. They meet in a dance class in a church near the council estates in North West London where they both live.

The novel hangs around the childhood friendship, and adult alienation, of the narrator and a girl named Tracey.

Swing Time by Zadie Smith