The narrator knows that if life were fair, Tracey would rise to the top while she herself would be allowed to drift to somewhere in the middle. But the narrator, charged with tending Bahram’s lovingly maintained list of banned customers, finds his perpetual “flamboyant, comic” rage “not so much offensive as poignantly self-defeating.” It has, after all, cost him countless customers, employees, and friends, and besides, “it was the only entertainment on offer.”īoth the narrator and her BFF Tracey are biracial, and both love dancing, but while the narrator’s gifts are modest, Tracey has the glimmer of an exceptional talent and the prima donna personality to go with it. Bahram has very definite, obnoxious ideas about black people, ideas that come up often that summer, as the entire parlor, from the Somali delivery boy to the Congolese cleaning lady, gets caught up in the black American tennis player Bryan Shelton’s 1994 run at Wimbledon.
Her boss is a “ridiculous Iranian called Bahram, very tall and thin, who considered himself, despite his surroundings, to be a man of quality.” He swans around with a long coat draped over his shoulders “like an Italian baron” and treats the narrator warmly until he realizes that she’s not, in fact, Persian herself.
The narrator is the mixed-race daughter of a fiercely self-educated Jamaican mother and an unambitious white dad. The novel’s narrator, never named, has discovered that her fancy degree in media studies isn’t going to instantly translate into a career, and she ends up taking the sort of crap job at a pizza parlor she could have gotten just as easily without it. To take just one small example: a sparkling six or so pages in the middle of Swing Time that could be a movie in themselves, reminiscent of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, say, less caustic but with the same affection for how motley city-dwellers behave in small groups.
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