just being darryl

nice quote from this zadie smith article in the ny times:

It’s very late in London now. We’ve been talking for a long time, and I want to let Zadie go. But before we hang up, she mentions the novelist Darryl Pinckney. He and his partner, the poet James Fenton, appear as themselves near the end of “Swing Time,” and I ask about the eruption of truth into fiction. “Darryl, to me,” Zadie says, “is a model of — I can’t describe it — but active ambivalence. He is as well read on African-American issues as anyone could imagine being. Yet there is also a part of him which is radically existential. He is absolutely aware that there is such a thing as having been subjected to the experience of blackness, which causes all kinds of consequences, political, social and personal, and at the same time, he claims the freedom of just being Darryl, in all his extreme particularity.